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THE 

WAR AND AFTER 

Short Chapters on Subjects of Serious 
Practical Import for the Average 
Citizen from A. D. 1915 onwards 

BY 

SIR OLIVER LODGE, F.R.S. 

PRINCIPAL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM 

AUTHOR OF "RAYMOND OR LIFE AND DEATH," 

ETC. 




NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






COPYRIGHT, 1918, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



MAY -4 1918 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

©GLA497160 



TO 

PRESIDENT WILSON 

AT ONE TIME PRINCIPAL OF THE UNIVERSITY 

THIS EDITION IS DEDICATED WITH THE 

ADMIRATION OF THE AUTHOR 



England! the time is come when thou should'st wean 

Thy heart from its emasculating food; 

The truth should now be better understood; 

Old things have been unsettled; we have seen 

Fair seed-time, better harvest might have been 

But for thy trespasses; . . . 

England! all nations in this charge agree: 

But worse, more ignorant in love and hate, 

Far — far more abject, is thine Enemy: 

Therefore the wise pray for thee, though the freight 

Of thy offences be a heavy weight. 

Oh grief that Earth's best hopes rest all with Thee! 

Wordsworth, Sonnet XXI 



PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

THIS book was published in 191 5 at a time 
when events were going hard for us. We 
had no adequate supply of munitions, and 
our men had to suffer bombardment with severe 
economy of retort. Since then things have 
mended, the Nation has provided what is necessary 
and set its teeth in a firmer grip, but our feelings, 
whether for friend or foe, have not appreciably 
changed, and there is practically nothing in the 
book that need be altered. 

Nothing to be changed, but something loud to 
be added, something that the world is shouting, 
something vivid in historic significance. One of 
the great phases of history is being enacted before 
our eyes — the union of the Dominions and of the 
New and Old Worlds, a hand-clasp of friendliness 
across the seas, a beginning of the Federation of 
the English-speaking race. 

Welcome, thrice welcome, are our brethren now 
definitely enrolled in an unselfish Crusade for free- 
dom and righteousness. Surely this exalteth a na- 
tion. Never was the star-spangled banner so glo- 
rious as when it was unfurled in a vigorous and 
decisive effort to bring to nought all that mean and 
ugly preparation, to counter all that ruthless effi- 
ciency, which sought by violence and cruelty to 
dominate the earth. 

A Nation never yet defeated, nor likely to be 
defeated, has after mature consideration and un- 
exampled patience done even more than was asked 



viii PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 

or expected; it has entered into the struggle as if 
it, too, had been endangered, has esteemed no sac- 
rifice too great for the nobility of the cause, and 
now upholds on the distant Continent of Europe 
the threatened freedom of mankind. The conse- 
quences of such an action are not to be estimated 
by any one generation ; they stretch beyond our 
narrow purview, and will benefit our descendants 
a millennium hence. 

It would surely be well now for every civilised 
nation to join in, to bear at first hand some of the 
burden, to feel directly some of the evil, of this 
atrocious War; and thereafter to meet and decide 
that civilisation had reached a point at which state- 
organised brutality and destruction must cease, 
that underground and undersea miscellaneous 
slaughter with accompaniments of poison and filth 
shall never more be regarded as an endurable 
method of settling international affairs, and that 
never again shall the discoveries of Science be pro- 
faned in this diabolical manner. 

If there are special virtues cultivated by war — 
as in old time there certainly were— we must learn 
to acquire them by other means. The world is now 
a unit as it never was before ; mankind must learn 
to behave as one family on this small heavenly 
body that we call the earth; the cultivation of in- 
ternational friendliness and confidence and honour 
must be the permanent aim of every statesman 
worthy of the name; and the present ghastly af- 
front to the peaceful heavens must be the last. 

To that end our children must strive, and may 
God grant them wisdom and insight and courage 
and faith. 

Ouver Lodge:. 



PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION 

THE Workers' Educational Association, and 
other organizations, have provided or rec- 
ommended for their students a large sup- 
ply of historical literature connected with the war, 
and it may be hoped that much of it is being read 
by those whose voting power — surely under some 
strange providential guidance — helps to control 
the conduct of this country's affairs. But the mass 
of material is so great, and the time for reading 
so short, that an attempt to concentrate attention 
on special points and to emphasize some of the 
more pressing and practical features of the pres- 
ent difficult but hopeful situation, may be useful. 
It is with this sole but very serious aim that the 
following chapters have been written. 

As I have no pretension to be an historian I shall 
often quote from other writers when dealing with 
historical facts and national characters. Of all 
the readily accessible treatises dealing with the 
crisis, perhaps the most noteworthy anticipation 
of current events and impartial survey of the na- 
tional characteristics which have led to the present 
outburst is contained in a book called The Anglo- 
German Problem, written well before the outbreak 
of hostilities and published in 19 12 by that distin- 
guished Belgian, Dr. Charles Sarolea, Head of the 
French Department of the University of Edin- 
burgh. I shall quote a few passages from this 
book to illustrate the clear knowledge possessed 
by experts a few years ago. 

ix 



x PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION 

As to the rights and wrongs of the diplomacy 
preceding this war, our own case is so clear and 
strong, and so emphasized by our just and honour- 
able — but as it turns out lamentable — unprepared- 
ness, that only a few people here and there, mis- 
led by false statements, can require a legal argu- 
ment to prove it; I do not touch on this subject, 
but note that an able summing-up by a Swiss- 
American jurist exists, in a book called The Evi- 
dence in the Case, by the Hon. James M. Beck, 
LL.D., of New York, with a Preface by the ex- 
American Ambassador to this country, Mr. Choate. 
The book was published by Putnam's Sons early 
in 19 1 5, and is fiercely interesting. 

Only one other tract will I mention here — 
though from others I may quote — and that is the 
pamphlet by Professor Gilbert Murray entitled 
How Can War Ever be Right? which I hope will 
be read by all premature pacifists. 

It is highly desirable at the present time to pre- 
serve our mental balance. We must, it is true, de- 
nounce in measured terms the inhuman atrocities 
which have been authoritatively sanctioned and en- 
forced on helpless victims, and the campaign of lies 
and slander with which neutral nations have been 
affronted by diplomatists to whom every trace of 
the saving sense of humour seems to be denied; 
and we must sorrowfully admit that the attitude of 
those politicians and rulers is approved and fol- 
lowed by droves of misguided patriots. Yet we 
should earnestly endeavour to distinguish between 
these recent outgrowths of unholy subservience to 
a dominating clique, and the more permanent and 
friendly aspect of the European nations with 
which we are at war. We should bear continually 



PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xi 

in mind — hard though it often be — the services to 
humanity, and the lovable, friendly, and homely 
past aspects of the majority of our present foes. 
What real quarrel have we with Austria, with the 
peasants of Bavaria, with the Rhine provinces, 
with Hanover, or with the down-trodden Prussian 
Poles? 

To mention no others, we actually have to reckon 
the Tyrolese among our foes at the present time — 
they are furnishing sharpshooters to the German 
army; and in other only less flagrant cases we are 
being slain at the call of duty by those who are 
essentially our friends. To assist them in doing 
their duty, which else must be repulsive, a cam- 
paign of hate has been artificially fostered. This 
dementia is not reciprocated, and it would be ludi- 
crous were its consequences not likely to be so seri- 
ous to those of our number who happen to fall 
helpless into the hands of a temporarily insane peo- 
ple. 

But, while admitting with sad astonishment the 
terrible Downfall in moral status which has been 
the accompaniment of half a century's aim at 
World Power, let us see to it that we remember 
our own shortcomings also; and while proclaiming 
fully and fairly that they are of a kind differing 
toto ccelo from those with which we are contending, 
yet admit sorrowfully enough that we might have 
done far better in the past, and hope that we may 
have wisdom and resolution enough to do better 
in the future. 

O. J. L. 

May, 1915. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface to the American Edition ..... vii 
Preface to the English Edition ix 



Part I : The Past 

CHAPTER 

I. The Great Age of German Philosophy 3 
II. German Characteristics : Their Strength 

and Weakness 10 

III. Revulsion Towards Materialism . . 14 

IV. Revolt Against Christianity ... 22 
V. Moral Power of Nations .... 28 

VI. Modern German Philosophy . . -34 

VII. A Conflict of Ideals 45 

VIII. Two Fallacies 56 

IX. Germany and England: German Atti- 
tude 62 

X. England and Germany: English Atti- 
tude 75 

Part II : The Present 

XL "S.O.S." What is the War for? . . 85 

XII. Material Efficiency and Self-Interest 92 

XIII. Evil or Aggressive War 103 

XIV. Savagery 109 

XV. Non-Resistance and Defensive War . 118 

xiii 



xiv CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XVI. Christianity and Pacifism .... 126 

XVII. " Love Your Enemies" 132 

Part III: The Future 

XVIII. The Outcome 143 

XIX. On the Dulness of War, and Its Civilian 

Aspect, and on Effective Neutrality 149 

XX. Social Unrest . 156 

XXI. Industrial Conditions 166 

XXII. Social Reform . ....... 178 

XXIII. Education and Science . . . 190 

XXIV. Peace and Disarmament .... 203 
XXV. National Rearrangement .... 208 

XXVI. The Future of Europe 217 

XXVII. Other Home Reforms 227 

XXVIII. Conclusion 241 

Index to Quotations 245 

Index . 249 



PART I: THE PAST 

Corruptio optimi pessima 



In a democratic country of thirty-six millions it may seem infinitely 
unimportant what one individual does or thinks, as compared with 
what in an autocracy one man, and that the irresponsible ruler, does 
or thinks; yet the fate of the democratic country depends clearly 
enough upon the collective effect of the views and character of each 
one of her individual citizens; and whilst there is here less danger 
of a selfish policy, through the obvious difficulty or combination for 
such an end, and through the necessary conflictfof interests, there is 
more danger of apathy, through each man thinking that these things 
are not his concern. — E. de Selincourt. 



THE WAR AND AFTER 

PART I: THE PAST 
CHAPTER I 

THE GREAT AGE OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 

WHY is .the world so horrified at the out- 
burst of savagery which has now oc- 
curred? Because it is a blasphemous 
prostitution of high gifts and a dragging in the 
mire of a noble Past. The old Germany was full 
of attraction for thoughtful Englishmen: it had 
much that was consoling amid the welter of trade 
and politics and business and sport which seemed 
to saturate the British atmosphere. The peace- 
fully social and calmly learned surroundings of 
Germany were restful, and it could really be re- 
garded as a spiritual home. 

Briefly let me try to illustrate, by a very few 
extracts from German literature, the kind of shock 
which must have been experienced by those who 
have been well acquainted with the Germany of 
the past. 

The greatest Teutonic names in Philosophy are 
surely those of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. A few 
short extracts from these writers will give an idea 
of the peaceful absorption in which they lived and 

3 



4 THE WAR AND AFTER 

worked, and show how far the country was in its 
greatness from the Prussianized Germany of 
to-day. 

Modern Germany is a young nation, and "may 
be said to have had a sober youth. She has 
been blamed for culpable absent-mindedness and 
absorption in mystic speculation, while other 
nations were stealing a march upon her in ex- 
ploiting the habitable world. I believe," says J. 
H. Muirhead, "that never was she truer to her- 
self/' 

In remote Konigsberg, in Eastern Prussia, 
on a monument to the memory of Immanuel 
Kant, the first sentence of perhaps the greatest 
passage written by him is inscribed, in which the 
two immensities of Nature and Spirit are held to- 
gether as for a moment for men to contem- 
plate. 

"Two things, the longer and oftener I contem- 
plate them, fill my soul with ever new and ever 
growing awe — the starry heavens above me and 
the moral law within me. 

"I cannot regard either of them as veiled in 
darkness, or as belonging to some transcendental 
realm beyond the range of my perception. I see 
them before me. I connect them directly with the 
consciousness of my own being. 

"The first of them begins from the position I 
occupy in the world of sense. It extends my con- 
nexion therewith into an immeasurable space — > 
with world upon worlds and systems upon systems 
— with the boundless time of their periodic motions, 
their beginning and their duration. 

"The second begins from my invisible self, from 
my personality. It places me in a world which 



GREAT GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 5 

has true infinitude, whose outlines only the under- 
standing can trace, and with which my connexion 
is not merely accidental, as it is with the world 
of sense: my relation to it is universal and neces- 
sary. 

"The vision of the first nullifies my importance. 
I am but a brute creature, which has borrowed the 
material of which it is made, and must give it back 
again to the planet on which it lives — the planet 
itself hardly more than a speck in the vast universe. 
But the vision of the second raises my worth be- 
yond all limitations. It exhibits me as a being 
which has mind, and is endowed with personality. 
In me is revealed the moral law, which shows me 
independent of all animality and of the whole 
world of sense, accepting neither conditions 
nor bounds but pointing onwards to infini- 
tude." 

And Sir Henry Jones, commenting on this pas- 
sage and on the philosophy of Kant generally, in 
his Provincial Assembly Lecture 1912, on "The 
Immanence of God and the Individuality of Man," 
writes thus: — 

"The world of sense is now being re- 
valuated: the whole scheme, including man, is 
being interpreted anew. It is maintained, with 
a confidence which is growing, that sense and the 
things of sense, and the whole scheme of 
finitude, do not obscure but reveal the eternal veri- 
ties. The temporal is not secular any more, nor 
is there anything in this wide world which is com- 
mon and unclean; unless, alas! man has made it 
so." 

Such philosophy is by no means barren; and, as 
a practical outcome, a friendly and co-operative 



6 THE WAR AND AFTER 

federation of humanity is looked forward to as an 
ideal for the future. 

Professor J. H. Muirhead tells us, in his ad- 
mirable little book German Philosophy in 
Relation to the War, that "there dawned upon Kant, 
not as in the Middle Ages as a theological dogma 
or as a legal speculation, nor as with some mod- 
erns as a poetic dream, but as a consequence of a 
mature philosophical conviction, the possibility of 
a peaceful federation of States, which should re- 
place the present transitional phase of armed 
violence tempered by partial and precarious 
treaties." 

It was this idea that he worked out in his old 
age in the short essay on Eternal Peace. He 
there sets out in the form of preliminary and 
definitive articles the conditions, negative and 
positive, of such a peace. "Mo treaty of peace 
can be a real one which is made with the secret 
reservation of material for a future war." No 
independent State (great and small are here the 
same) shall be acquired by another, by inherit- 
ance, exchange, purchase, or gift. Standing 
armies shall in time cease. No public debt shall 
be contracted for purposes of external action. 
No State shall forcibly interfere with the Con- 
stitution or Government of another State. No 
State at war with another State shall commit 
such hostile acts as must make mutual trust im- 
possible in a future condition of peace. He 
denounces assassination, poisoning, breaches of 
capitulation, and attempts to make use of 
treachery among the enemy; and he adds a 
warning against "punitive wars" between 
States, as inconsistent with the idea of political 



GREAT GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 7 

right. All these things are the destruction of 
trust between nations. If practised and per- 
sisted in they can only end in a war of exter- 
mination and "the kind of eternal peace that 
would be found in the great graveyard of the 
human race." 

"The fact," says Kant, "that the sense of com- 
munity among the peoples of the earth has gone 
so far that the violation of right in one place 
is felt everywhere, has made the idea of a citi- 
zenship of the world no fantastic dream, but a 
necessary extension of the unwritten code of 
States and Peoples." 

To those who regard attempts at permanent 
international friendship as hopeless and Utopian, 
Muirhead would reply that "the essential prin- 
ciple on which we are to go in all politics is 
that the practicable is to be measured by the 
right, and not the right by the practicable. We 
must gradually learn to say in politics as in morals, 
'I ought, therefore I can/ " 

This also is the view taken by one of Ger- 
many's greatest philosophers: — 

"The binding cord," writes Hegel, "is not force, 
but the deep-seated feeling of order that is pos- 
sessed by us all." He has no words strong 
enough to denounce von Haller — the von 
Treitschke of his time, who had written: "It is the 
eternal unchangeable decree of God that the most 
powerful must rule, and will for ever rule," and 
who had poured contempt on the national liberties 
of Germany and our own Magna Charta and the 
Bill of Rights as "mere documentary liberties." 
In all this, Hegel says, Haller has confused the 
force of right with the right of force. "The 



8 THE WAR AND AFTER 

power he means is not the power of the right, 
but the power of the vulture to tear in pieces the 
innocent lamb." 

"War is not the sequel, it is the failure of 
politics. The sequel of politics is art, science, 
religion — all that goes to make what Aristotle 
called the good life — for the full development of 
which the State is the essential condition. But 
the State is far from, supreme. Above and be- 
yond the State there is the spirit of the World, 
which is also the spirit of God, before which 
all things are judged: The history of the world 
is the judgment of the world" (a saying usually 
attributed to Schiller). 

Wherefore, says Hegel again, looking forward 
to the future, "let us together greet the dawn of 
a better time, when the spirit that has hitherto 
been driven out may return to itself again, and 
win room and space wherein to found a kingdom 
of its own." 

And so once more back to the anticipation of 
Kant :— 

"We may reasonably hail the Kingdom of 
Heaven as soon as ever the principle has taken 
root generally in the public mind that the efforts 
and creeds of the Churches should all point in 
one direction — all have one aim — a Divine com- 
munity upon this earth. For this principle, 
because it is the motive force of a continual 
striving towards perfection, is like a seed that 
grows up and produces other seed like itself; and 
thus contains implicitly the whole fabric which 
will one day illuminate and rule the world." 

Finally let us quote the aspiration of Fichte, 



GREAT GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 9 

whereby he encouraged his Nation to strive to- 
wards this great end: — 

"All ages, all the wise and good who have ever 
breathed on this earth, all their thoughts and 
aspirations after a Highest, mingle in these voices 
and surround you, and raise supplicating hands 
to you. Even Providence, if one may say so, 
and the Divine plan of the world in the creation 
of a race of man, which indeed only exists that 
it may be taken into men's thoughts and brought 
to reality by them, pleads with you to save its 
honour and its very being." 

To us and the Allies these words might be 
addressed to-day. Alas! only a lunatic would 
now address them to Germany. 



CHAPTER II 

GERMAN CHARACTERISTICS I 
THEIR STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS 

HOW are we to understand the strange dif- 
ferences of aim and outlook between the 
Germans and ourselves? An enlightening 
article by Baron von Hiigel in a magazine called 
The Quest for April 191 5 is of considerable 
help. He speaks of the German thirst for theory, 
and of the English contrary habit of shrinking 
from all systematic thought, as specially char- 
acteristic :— 

"Theory, system (Weltanschauung) , is, for the 
average Englishman, something that instantly puts 
him ill at ease, or at least something that he dis- 
believes and avoids; for the German, it is in his 
very blood. ... It is this innate need of sys- 
tem that renders the German steady, but also 
obstinate; virile and brutal; profound and pedan- 
tic; comprehensive and rich in outlook, and ration- 
alist and doctrinaire." 

Germany must be considered a sentimental 
nation. The feeling of patriotism is allowed 
a good deal of sentimental expression. They 
seem to have but little faculty of self-criticism; 
or perhaps it is the absence of any sense of humour 
that enables them to say and sing things, at meet- 

10 



GERMAN CHARACTERISTICS 11 

ings and suppers and smoking concerts, which 
trend perilously near balderdash. An Irish gath- 
ering of the same kind is less sentimental and 
more amusing. 

The Kaiser's speeches are typical of this sort 
of attitude, and, though rather fine, would be 
impossible to any one who realized that he was 
on the verge of making himself ridiculous. 

The ethnologist Dr. A. H. Keane, in The Living 
Races of Mankind, writes: 

"All admit that the German is capable of a 
deep love of nature, of rare poetical feeling, 
and devotion to any cause he may have 
embraced. [But] he is easily led into 
extremes, genuine sentiment becomes over-sen- 
sitive, anger rises to fury, resentment to ran- 
cour and hatred, in the pursuit even of noble 
ideals." 

Imperial enthusiasm, however legitimate, always 
seems liable to lead to exaggeration and to a 
trampling on the rights of others. So Germanic 
enthusiasm has been misled, warped, and made 
harmful by the dominating influence of Prussia 
in practical politics; advantage has been taken of 
current sentiment, and it has been applied in 
practice with untoward and bombastic and es- 
sentially stupid results. The nation has submitted 
itself unduly to the Prussian spirit, but we can 
trust that the general German characteristics will 
eventually overcome this same evil spirit — "a 
spirit," says von Hiigel, "not confined to Germany, 
and which is even more the enemy of the German 
soul than it can ever be of our own military 
peace." 

The difficult thing to understand, he goes on 



1% THE WAR AND AFTER 

to say, is the thorough and "apparently life-and- 
death allegiance of a people, not only highly edu- 
cated and, in the professional classes, mostly 
awake even unto scepticism, but also, surely, in- 
curably idealistic and mystical, to so thoroughly 
cold and calculating, mechanical and cynical, a 
system as is the Prussian Realpolitik, with its con- 
ception, and largely its practice, of a frankly un- 
moral statesmanship. 

"All men, at least here in England, see and 
know that this frankly Machiavellian policy, 
originally special to the Prussian militarist 
school, is now practised, inculcated, systema- 
tized and assumed by Germany (in so far as 
Germany now operates as a determining, 
political, diplomatic, and military power) with 
a deliberation, preparedness, persistency, and 
ruthlessness, both towards its own German in- 
struments and towards its non-German oppo- 
nents, unmatched, on such a scale and amidst 
such civilized peoples, throughout the annals 
of the world." 

The veneer of civilization quickly peels off an 
upstart race and shows the barbarian beneath. 
This is always liable to happen amid the stress 
of war, but it is usually kept in control by 
higher authority. In the present case, however, 
there is no higher authority. The veneer of 
Prussian civilization was so thin it peeled off 
before the war began, and the brutalities were 
contemplated beforehand, and gloated on, and 
carried out, not in defiance of authority, but at 
its dictation. 

In an atmosphere of this kind, Peace Con- 
ferences and all humanitarian talk must indeed 



GERMAN CHARACTERISTICS 13 

have seemed absurd, and must have been en- 
couraged from cynical motives. By laying real 
restrictions on ourselves, and getting the bar- 
barian occasionally to assent to them in words, 
we were virtually playing his game. We should 
not attempt such a thing if we were contemplat- 
ing a battle with savages; and, most unexpected- 
ly, it is a battle with savages that we are en- 
gaged in — though, unfortunately, savages with 
all the tools and weapons and ingenious devices 
of civilization. Their will to use them, moreover, 
for the slaughter and torture of their fellow-man, 
is sustained and intensified and made utterly un- 
scrupulous by a heathen religion and a false phil- 
osophy. The whole civilized world should rise in 
unison against a foe to humanity of this diabolical 
character. 



CHAPTER III 

REVULSION TOWARDS MATERIALISM 

THE fact is that Philosophy has a much 
more effective influence on conduct than 
is generally in this country supposed. It 
may not be known by that name; people may 
imagine that they have no particular philosophy 
of life; but practically they have, and unless they 
are mere drifting casuals they cannot avoid having 
one — though its formulation is a subject for pro- 
fessors. And any country in which as a body 
the educated class loses its independence and be- 
comes subservient to State officialism is in a 
parlous condition; the blind are then led by those 
whose eyes are bandaged. 

It may be thought that to associate recent 
German conduct with materialistic philosophy or 
with a philosophical revolt of any kind is far- 
fetched and absurd. It is not so. But to make 
the position clear may require a little technical 
argument. Ideas are not remote and inert things, 
but are living forces in the minds of men, con- 
tinually influencing character and expressing 
themselves in action. 

So now, as J. H. Muirhead has well said, "What 
we see confronting each other throughout the 
world are not so much armed hosts of men as 

14 



REVULSION TOWARDS MATERIALISM 15 

opposing ideals of life that have their root in 
divergent theories as to the inner make of the 
universe and as to human destiny in it. . . . 
These things have come upon us, not because 
German thought has been faithful to its great 
philosophical tradition, but because it has broken 
away from its spirit and falsified its results. It 
is a story, not of a continuous development, but 
of a reaction — a great rebellion and apostasy." 

Matter and Spirit 

There are two main aspects of the physical 
universe — matter on the one hand, the ether of 
space on the other. For all practical purposes 
they are distinct, though doubtless ultimately re- 
lated. Though distinct in being, they are inti- 
mately connected in function; and all activity 
consists in the transference of energy from one 
to the other, and back again. Static energy 
belongs to the ether, kinetic energy belongs to 
matter; and in every case of activity, when work 
is done, energy is transmuted from static to ki- 
netic or from kinetic to static; and at the same 
time it is transferred from ether to matter or 
from matter to ether. 

Alternations sometimes go on rapidly — many 
times in the hundredth of a second; while in 
other cases energy is stored in one or other 
form for millions of years. The ultimate nature 
of both forms of energy is probably unknown, 
but if either is higher and more fundamental 
than the other, it must be the kinetic form; and 
the static may ultimately be explicable as an 
aspect of that. Take this apparent digression as 
a parable. 



16 THE WAR AND AFTER 

There are likewise two aspects of the Universe 
as a whole. There may be many more, but there 
are at least two— the material and the spiritual 
—and all human existence depends on the inter- 
action of these two. A right appreciation of 
the universe will attend to both these aspects. 
Wisdom lies in appreciating them both at their 
true value and recognizing due proportion be- 
tween them. If either is dominant, surely it 
should be the higher — it should be spirit, mind, 
intelligence, soul; which are not material things, 
but which utilize material things for their 
manifestation. Spirit and Matter appear to be 
distinct, though presumably they are ultimately 
related; and the activities that we call life 
and mind depend on their connexion, or 
interaction, through nerve and brain mechan- 
ism. 

The key-note of the material universe is 
recurrence — operation in cycles — the atoms 
going through various changes, but ultimately 
returning to their initial state; — a cycle of 
transformation which may be simply typified 
by the evaporation of water from the sea and 
its condensation again as rain. Or again, as 
another example, we may adduce the storage 
of atmospheric ingredients in vegetation under 
the influence of sunshine, — in the form it may 
be of timber or of coal, — and their subsequent 
release during combustion: the same molecules 
being hereafter again acted upon by solar 
radiation in the leaves of plants, and stored as 
vegetable tissue once more. In all such cases 
we see a cycle of recurrence, the atoms and the 



REVULSION TOWARDS MATERIALISM IT 

material universe generally being fixed and un- 
progressive. 

Even in the sea, we are now taught that 
sunshine is effective towards life. The sea 
harvest is only second in value to the land harvest. 
Animal life can only feed upon vegetable, it can- 
not directly assimilate material from the mineral 
kingdom; and vegetation itself can only do so 
under the influence and with the aid of the energy 
of sunlight. Thus, as Professor Herdman points 
out with reference to marine organisms, they 
rise through the chain — Inorganic molecules, 
Diatoms or seaweed, Copepoda, Sprat, Whiting, 
Cod, Man; — and then fall back to lower organ- 
isms and unorganized molecules once more, 
descending through the agency of Bacteria to 
diatoms and debris; a never-ending cycle of 
changes. 

And, even without special knowledge, Recur- 
rence in the physical world is a commonplace of 
observation. Day and night succeed one an- 
other, and summer and winter; while live things 
go on growing, reaching maturity, and then de- 
cay. The material parts of these also go through 
a cycle of changes, like seed time and harvest 
and seed time again; but running through the 
organic world there is a soul which ages with 
the times; the experience of the race is stored 
in mysterious fashion; and instincts — the growth 
of ages — excite our wonder. The soul of man 
grows onward, never in closed curves: it 
is as old as time itself. In grief and in sor- 
row, aye and also in love and in joy, the world 
groweth old. 

Thus the keynote of the psychical universe 



18 THE WAR AND AFTER 

is progression; — movement in spirals it may be, 
but not recurrent, not cyclical. What may be 
called life, or the soul, utilizes matter to ad- 
vance, to go through a real process of evolution. 
The material is the instrument by aid of which, 
or rather through the passive opposition of 
which, it rises; rising in the very act of over- 
coming inherent difficulties and inertia-like ob- 
struction. We ourselves utilize matter — the mat- 
ter of this planet, "the dust of the earth," — 
for the purpose of manifesting ourselves, our 
own personality, our own thoughts, our own 
identity; which are not material, but which 
utilize matter and make it subservient to our 
needs. 

This is conspicuously done by all artists. 
An artist is one who is specially skilful in 
utilizing matter for purposes of thought, of 
beauty, of something which he cannot other- 
wise convey to the rest of mankind. He ar- 
ranges pigments, or he carves stone, or he 
erects a building, or he makes black marks on 
paper; and the result is a painting, a statue, 
a cathedral, a poem, or an oratorio. The 
music has to be incarnated in order to be ap- 
preciated; the poem has to be heard. In itself, 
as recorded, in its material aspect alone, it is 
nothing but black marks on paper; and in- 
deed the picture is nothing but cunningly ar- 
ranged chemical material — pigments; and yet 
what a soul is there displayed, what emotions 
are there exhibited! The thought of the artist, 
the emotion of the artist, is called out, not 
in the matter, but in the receptive soul which 
has the potentiality for thoughts and ideas akin 



REVULSION TOWARDS MATERIALISM 19 

to his own; and thus is conveyed to all suc- 
ceeding generations something which the world 
will not willingly let die. Thought is creative 
— genuinely creative — in the sense of bringing 
into existence things which without it would 
not have been — things which are new to the 
universe; — and matter is the vehicle in which 
the thought is incarnate and made mani- 
fest. 

The obstruction which matter offers to the 
artist enables him to put forth effort, calls for 
effort on the part of all of us. We live in a 
world where things are not easy. This utiliza- 
tion of matter is not easy; matter is obstruc- 
tive; it has inertia. Difficulties have to be 
overcome, and this is good exercise and train- 
ing. The result is evolution — the rising on 
stepping-stones of matter to higher things. The 
outcome of all the interaction is Life, more Life, 
more fullness and completeness and elevation of 
Life. 

But there is always a danger lest the material 
become dominant and overpower the spiritual, 
whose very existence may be denied. For just 
as in the physical universe matter is obvious and 
insistent to our senses: whereas the Ether, no 
matter how substantial it may really be, is in- 
tangible and elusive, so that its existence is 
disbelieved in and denied by the specifically 
scientific philosophy of modern German physicists ; 
so it is also in the larger scheme to which 
these things are an allegory. Our present sense 
organs, inherited from a long animal ancestry, 
are framed for the material aspect of things. 
Anything beyond that is a matter of inference, 



20 THE WAR AND AFTER 

and by untrained or unreceptive persons may 
readily be disbelieved in. A whole nation may 
go astray in this direction, and, by over-em- 
phasizing the material, may lose the spiritual 
sense altogether; and may prostitute science to 
the sheer meaningless destruction of works of 
Art and of everything held sacred by hu- 
manity. 

The purely material aspect of the Universe 
has been preached, not indeed by the great 
philosophers, — far otherwise in their case, — but 
by the modern smaller men who have revolted 
from the German philosophy of the great time. 
How far the bastard materialistic philosophy 
of Haeckel has taken root in Germany I do not 
know; but I know that it has far too much 
power among the classes struggling for educa- 
tion in this country, — among whom are some 
who have been seeking to indoctrinate them- 
selves and their fellows with the foolish para- 
doxes of '"determinism," wherein people are sup- 
posed to be automata — guiltless of all blame what- 
ever they do. Fortunately the consequences — 
the fruits — of a merely mechanical philosophy 
have now become conspicuous. 

The possibility of such a reversal of the process 
of evolution has been anticipated by Professor 
Bergson : — 

"What would happen," he asks, "if the moral 
effort of humanity should turn in its tracks at 
the moment of attaining its goal, and if some 
diabolical contrivance should cause it to produce 
the mechanization of spirit instead of the spirit- 
ualization of matter? There was a people pre- 
destined to try the experiment." 



REVULSION TOWARDS MATERIALISM 21 

The material progress of such a people has 
altogether outstripped and overpowered, or 
negatived and reversed, their spiritual advance. 
"The idea, peculiar to the nineteenth century, 
of employing science in the satisfaction of our 
material wants, has given a wholly unforeseen 
extension to the mechanical arts, and has equipped 
man in less than fifty years with more tools than 
he had made during the thousands of years he 
had lived on the earth. Each new machine being 
for man a new organ — an artificial organ which 
merely prolongs the natural organs — his body 
has become suddenly and prodigiously increased 
in size, without his soul being able at the same 
time to dilate to the dimensions of his new 
body." 

There has always been a sort of nightmare 
that some day mechanism would get the upper 
hand and begin to enslave humanity. Well, we 
must take care that it does not. We must take 
warning by the German downfall, and must re- 
turn, as our leaders have returned, to the theory 
and practice of a more idealistic philosophy. 



CHAPTER IV 

R3V0I/T AGAINST CHRISTIANITY 

BUT not against idealistic philosophy only 
has there been a revolt; we have seen also 
a Teutonic revulsion against Christianity. 
Among the latest of European nations to receive 
it, they doubtless tried hard to assimilate it, 
and on the whole must be said to have failed: 
failed only temporarily no doubt, but seriously. 
It is felt to be a foreign religion, essentially 
alien to the German mind. For their doctrine of 
irresponsible force, and the supreme dominance 
of the State uncontrolled by any Higher Power, 
is practical Atheism. They use the term "God," 
but that term may mean anything; it may be 
applied, and has been applied, to images and 
beings indistinguishable from devils. The use of 
the term depends on the attributes ascribed to 
the Being so named. There are Gods of cruelty 
and injustice in the Old Testament; and under 
priestly influence not only was Agag hewed 
in pieces before the Lord, but helpless non- 
combatants were sacrificed, and even the 
beasts belonging to them maliciously slaugh- 
tered. 

We had hoped that the civilized part of the 
human race had got beyond this state of uncon- 

22 



REVOLT AGAINST CHRISTIANITY 23 

scious blasphemy; but it is by fruits that we 
must judge the value of the belief of any nation 
and the nature of the God they worship. 

The savage attacks of Haeckel on Christianity 
have borne fruit: — Louvain. We see there 
materialism rampant. The religion of Thor and 
Odin seems to be taking root in Germany again: 
very much as Heine predicted: — 

"When once that restraining talisman, the 
Cross, is broken, then the smouldering ferocity 
of those ancient warriors will again blaze up; 
then will again be heard the deadly clang of that 
frantic Berserker wrath, of which the Norse 
poets say and sing so much. The talisman," 
he continued, "is rotten with decay, and the day 
will surely come when it will crumble and fall. 
Then the ancient stone-gods will arise from out 
the ashes of dismantled ruins, and rub the dust 
of a thousand years from their eyes; and 
finally, Thor, with his colossal hammer, will 
leap up, and with it shatter into fragments the 
Gothic cathedrals." 

The prophecy is being fulfilled more literally 
than Heine anticipated. 

But let it not be supposed that Germany has 
thrown over all religious influence. Professor 
Cramb asks and answers eloquently the 
question : — 

"But what definitely is to be Germany's part 
in the future of human thought? Germany 
answers: 'It is reserved for us to resume in 
thought that creative role in religion which the 
whole Teutonic race abandoned fourteen cen- 
turies ago.' Judaea and Galilee cast their dreary 
spell over Greece and Rome when Greece and 



24 THE WAR AND AFTER 

Rome were already sinking into decrepitude and 
the creative power in them was exhausted; 
. . . but Judaea and Galilee struck Germany in 
the splendour and heroism of her prime. Ger- 
many and the whole Teutonic people in the fifth 
century made the great error. They conquered 
Rome, but, dazzled by Rome's authority, they 
adopted the religion and the culture of the van- 
quished. Germany's own deep religious instinct, 
her native genius for religion, manifested in her 
creative success, was arrested, stunted, thwarted. 
But, having once adopted the new faith, she 
strove to live that faith, and for more than thirty 
generations she has struggled and wrestled to 
see with eyes that were not her eyes, to worship 
a God that was not her God, to live with a world- 
vision that was not her vision and to strive for 
a heaven that was not hers." 

That is supposed to be, and doubtless truly 
represents, Germany's ideal; and it constitutes 
the best basis for her ambition not only to found 
a world-empire, but also to create a world- 
religion. "No cultured European nation since 
the French Revolution has made any experiment 
in creative religion. The experiment which Eng- 
land, with her dull imagination, has recoiled from, 
Germany will make; the fated task which England 
has declined, she will essay." 

Unfortunately part of their endowment for the 
task is a thorough assimilation of the principles 
of Machiavelli, which were based on a clear recog- 
nition of the essentially weak and self-interested 
character of individuals and of all other States. 
Two of these principles may be thus specified:— 
first, that the end justifies the means; second, 



REVOLT AGAINST CHRISTIANITY 25 

that Christianity spells political and national ruin. 
So under Christianity the religious are at a 
disadvantage in all contests with the irreligious, 
and the world must fall into the hands of the 
unscrupulous. 

"Consequently we find Machiavelli telling us, 
with care and exactitude, when the prince should 
break his word, when he should betray his ser- 
vant, when he should throw over an ally he is 
pledged to support, and so on; and particular 
emphasis is laid upon the use of fraud to achieve 
his ends, for 'it behoves the ruler to be a fox 
as well as a lion.' . . . Machiavelli was the 
Treitschke and Bernhardi of the Renaissance." 

It is a point definitely at issue whether Chris- 
tianity is a religion which any given nation is 
able to absorb and practise. The Germans have 
made the effort and failed. We see the result. 
They regard it as an alien religion foisted on 
them from Galilee. They may even regard it 
as a Jewish religion, because it originated in 
Judaea; though it is one that the Jews have 
never accepted. It is by no means the first 
time that Christianity has had to struggle for 
existence; and we, the Allies, are now the cham- 
pions of Christendom — an honour which we can 
hardly be said to have done enough to deserve. 
Nevertheless, for better for worse, that is our 
function at the present time; and whether we 
are worthy of the position remains to be 
proved. 

It is to me largely a question of fact — a ques- 
tion of what is true. If this life be all, then a 
religion of Power might serve. Whether even 
then it would be the best, is a question, but it is a 



26 THE WAR AND AFTER 

hypothetical question hardly worth considering. 
There is no need to consider different hypoth- 
esis; our business is to ascertain what is true. 

And if this life be not all — if we have a con- 
tinued existence, and if Christianity is really a 
Divine revelation, — then it is no use hedging— 
half believing and half not believing — and trying 
to act in between, so to speak. Strength lies in 
whole beliefs, after having taken the trouble to 
ascertain the truth. 

Professor Cramb gives an admirable and 
sympathetic account of the German ideal of the 
religion of Power — a kind of Gothic religion — 
suited, as they think, to the Northern races; 
as the Classical religion once seemed suited to 
the South. The pages of Cramb on Treitschke 
remind me of the pages of Gibbon on Julian and 
his conflict with Christianity. Then it was Rome 
versus Galilee; and at the end the Emperor ad- 
mitted that the Galilean had conquered. Now 
it is a sort of Napoleonic idea: it is Corsica 
versus Galilee; and which shall conquer remains to 
be seen. 

Napoleon, a pioneer of this movement, also 
tried for world power or downfall; and in St 
Helena he gained downfall. Yet he had an ideal; 
he did much good to France, and he meant to do 
more good to the world as soon as he had become 
supreme. 

I suppose that Prussia thinks the same. It 
really does believe in German culture, thought, 
and character, and wishes to impose them on the 
world. It thinks the way to do that is by main 
force. That is part of the religion of power; 
it is a fighting religion, as Mohammedanism is. 



REVOLT AGAINST CHRISTIANITY 27 

That is where it has its present advantage over 
Christianity, which is essentially a religion of 
peace and goodwill. It seems an unequal con- 
test; and if the whole of the power were ter- 
restrial, so it might prove. The well-prepared 
and fighting nation appears to have every 
advantage. Nearly every advantage it really 
has. We ought not to assume that we shall 
always win. The consequences of defeat are 
too terrible to contemplate, but they might 
have to be undergone. We should then have to 
submit to a tyranny such as we have hitherto 
only read of. We should have to pass under 
the yoke. Civilians would have to stand and look 
on while horrors were perpetrated; and after- 
wards our existence would only be by the per- 
mission of our masters. Slavery — which we have 
helped to exterminate from the world — would be 
enforced upon us. 

We have run a great risk; the country has 
not taken it seriously enough. Mons was with- 
in an ace of being a disaster. The Germans over- 
ran France, and were close to Paris. 

What turned them back? I do not know. I 
doubt if any one fully and completely knows. 
September 3rd was a critical day. It is a war 
against Principalities and Powers and spiritual 
wickedness in high places. I myself believe in 
assistance from on High. 



[It may be necessary to explain that I am not referring to inci- 
dents imagined by writers of fiction.] 



CHAPTER V 

MORAL POWER OF NATIONS 

A REVOLT against Christianity I have called 
it. For surely one part of the essence of 
Christianity is that the weak should over- 
come the strong. That seems to be meaningless 
nonsense to the Prussian governing mind; for ac- 
cording to one of their writers, the unpardonable 
sin — the sin against the Holy Ghost — is weakness. 
Strength, dominance, power to impose your will 
on others — force of that kind is their conscious 
aim and object. That any weak nation should 
interfere, or delay the accomplishment of that 
object rouses their fierce indignation; yet they will 
find their strength succumb to weakness, and 
the nation which they have overpowered and op- 
pressed will be their ruin. They fear Russia; 
they pretend to respect France, though they wish 
to smash her beyond recovery; they hate and 
try to despise England; but the nation before 
which their strength will ultimately go down 
in deep disaster is the one they have held in 
derision and over which they have ridden rough- 
shod — Belgium. All honour to its King and his 
indomitable spirit, which rose superior to 
any idea of non-resistance to violence and 
wrong. 

28 



MORAL POWER OF NATIONS 29 

The world is the richer for the experience of 
the summer of 19 14, and Belgium has inscribed 
its name on an eternal roll of honour — the roll of 
those who have died in holding a pass against 
overwhelming odds. 

All Humanity blesses the heroic struggle for 
freedom of the Belgian nation, for without their 
aid the face of Europe would have been changed 
past redemption, and the Earth might have 
been subject to a brutal and intolerable dominance. 
We have witnessed in our own generation 
one of the classical contests of the world; and 
the tale will go down to remote posterity — 
a tale of deep infamy and lofty honour — re- 
lating how at this time the powers of evil were 
frustrated, and how the holiest cause emerged, 
stricken but victorious — triumphing, as always, 
through grievous pain. 

". . . notre force est en nous et nous avons souffert 

Meme notre douleur . . . devient notre orgueil." 

"Divine must be 
That triumph, when the very worst, the pain, 
And even the prospect of our brethren slain, 
Hath something in it which the heart enjoys : — 
In glory will they sleep and endless sanctity.' , 

Let it be clearly realized by posterity that the 
Prussian plans were well laid, and that from their 
point of view they ought to have succeeded. 
Had Belgium not resisted they would have swept 
over France before the French were ready, 
and before we could possibly have been there 
to help to stop them. After that the deluge! 
Their plans were for a sudden violent irruption, 



80 THE WAR AND AFTER 

for conquest of great tracts of territory and 
coast line, and afterwards reduction of the re- 
mainder at leisure. They trusted in wrong and 
robbery, and even in spite of the delay they very 
nearly succeeded. Their attack was a triumph 
of organization and evil foresight. Everything 
was prepared to the utmost; the only weakness 
was that they relied on the help of the Devil, 
and after the traditional manner he failed his 
worshippers at the last moment. 

Neutrality of Belgium 

People may be surprised at the immense im- 
portance attached in European Diplomacy to the 
neutrality of Belgium. It has been in the fore- 
ground of many treaties, and has been reaffirmed 
and guaranteed again and again. In 1870 the 
announcement that England would join against 
either side which infringed it, was effective; both 
Prussia and France renewed their obligation to 
respect Belgian neutrality, the Franco-German 
War was fought on that basis, and if unwit- 
tingly troops crossed the Belgian frontier they 
loyally laid down their arms. 

It is only on such a basis that small nations 
can live comfortably as neighbours to Great 
Powers; and it is instructive to realize how deep- 
seatedly the doctrine of neutrality is ingrained 
in the Belgians themselves. A Belgian writer 
in the Hibbert Journal, the Abbe Noel, writes 
thus : — 

"On the morrow of 1830 the powers which had 
roused us to independent life maternally endowed 
us with 'perpetual neutrality.' To this neutrality, 



MORAL POWER OF NATIONS 81 

guaranteed by solemn signatures, we vowed to 
be faithful with a loyalty which was, no doubt, 
excessive. I well recall how from my earliest 
years I learnt to contemplate this neutrality as 
the first condition of our national existence; it 
formed a dogma raised above the level of dis- 
cussion, an obligation which formed part of our 
very existence." 

How came it then, we English must ask, that 
our protestations in support of Belgian neutrality 
were on this last occasion discounted and ignored? 
It was because it was too generally thought that 
we should not act up to our duty, that our aims 
were selfish, and that so long as we were not 
ourselves endangered we should hold aloof. 

There have been times when a mere state- 
ment by a British ruler, that unless certain 
wrongs are terminated we shall intervene, has 
produced an immediate effect. But that has 
been when the ruler was one who had shown 
that he fully meant what he said, and would move 
without hesitation, trusting in the Lord of Hosts. 
The message of Oliver Cromwell, sent in the 
words of Milton; was sufficient by itself to stop 
the persecution of the Waldenses. The Duke 
of Savoy instantly succumbed. Under Crom- 
well, England became the head and protectress 
of Protestant Europe — and that without striking 
a foreign blow. By sheer strength of character 
and force of right. 

Would to God that the word of Britain to-day 
were powerful like that! Power so used is 
worth having. How came it that our sea-power 
to-day was ignored by a foe who underrated 
not our ships or our guns but our morale? 



3% THE WAR AND AFTER 

May it not have been because we were passive 
when, in the past, Bulgaria was overrun and 
tortured by our foes' present ally, the Turk? 
We had guaranteed the future of Armenia, and 
had replaced Macedonia under Turkish rule, 
but we lifted no hand to stop the slaughter of 
Armenians in the streets or among the moun- 
tains; nor did we make effective effort to check 
Turkish misrule in Macedonia. One other in- 
stance, even more crucial,— we did not defend 
Denmark from the disgraceful raid which took 
from it Schleswig-Holstein. 

On the other hand we have been accused 
of coveting a Naboth's vineyard in South 
Africa, and of carrying on a diplomacy of 
bluff, till at length a calamitous war became 
inevitable. The rights and wrongs of all this 
are part of the commonplaces of party politics, 
and any one-sided presentation of the case is 
sure to be unfair; but that is the way our case 
appeared to continental Powers, and that is why 
they neither feared nor respected us. For our 
sins, — or for our virtues if these were virtues, 
— we are smitten. We have now at length re- 
gained the respect of the world, though only 
at a mighty cost. Let us see to it henceforward 
that we lose it not again. It is an asset worth 
having. 

In a pamphlet issued by the Society of Friends 
I find the following true statement: — 

"Instructed opinion no longer holds that 
the true welfare of a people depends on the 
extent of territory under its government; a 
clear distinction has become apparent between 
administering a country and possessing or 



MORAL POWER OF NATIONS 33 

utilizing its wealth. The great empires are 
filled with poverty-stricken people leading 
diminished lives. Certain small nations are 
models of human welfare to the rest of 
Europe. ,, 

I should say this of the country called Tyrol; 
there are none haughtily rich there, and none 
poor below the level of self-respect. It is a 
thousand pities that Austria has been dragged 
into this infamous war, for it seems to treat 
its provinces remarkably well, and with it England 
has till now had no quarrel. 

"The sword, as the sword, can give no rights. 
. . . The spirit of conquest never can confer true 
glory and happiness upon a nation that has at- 
tained power sufficient to defend itself. . . . In- 
definite progress undoubtedly there ought to be 
somewhere, but let that be in knowledge, in 
science, in civilization, in the increase of the num- 
bers of the people and in the augmentation of their 
virtue and happiness. . . . 

by the Soul 
Only, the Nations shall be great and free." 



CHAPTER VI 

MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 

EVEN Nietzsche in his saner moments saw 
that militarism was a dangerous enemy to 
genuine German culture, and that it is liable 
to generate a bastard variety: — "Prussian vic- 
tories/' he says, "are secured by severe mili- 
tary discipline, and other factors which have 
nothing to do with culture"; and he gives 
warning that if these factors be permitted to 
grow and spread, "they will have the power to 
extirpate German mind; and when that is done, 
who knows whether there will still be anything 
to be made out of the surviving German 
body?" 

Mommsen also sounded a note of warning many 
years ago: — 

"Have a care lest in this country, which has 
been at once a power in arms and a power 
in intelligence, the intelligence should vanish, 
and nothing but the pure military State should 
remain." 

And after the Franco-German War Nietzsche 
wrote: — 

"A great victory is a great danger. The 
greatest error at the present is the belief that this 
fortunate war has been won by German Culture. 

34 



MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 85 

At present both the public and the private life 
of Germany shows every sign of the utmost 
want of culture" {Unseasonable Contemplations: 

1873)- 

And again, in Human, All Too Human, he 
says : "The greatest disadvantage of the national 
army, now so much glorified, lies in the 
squandering of men of the highest civilization; 
it is only by the favourableness of all cir- 
cumstances that there are such men at all; 
how carefully and anxiously should we deal with 
them, since long periods are required to bring 
about the chance conditions for the production 
of such delicately organized brains. But as 
the Greeks wallowed in the blood of Greeks, 
so do Europeans now in the blood of Euro- 
peans; and, indeed, taken relatively, it is the 
most highly cultivated who are sacrificed, those 
who promise an abundant and excellent 
posterity; for such stand in the front of the 
battle as commanders, and also expose them- 
selves to most danger, by reason of their higher 
ambition." 

He thus clearly recognizes that war is not a 
eugenic agent, but is destructive of much which 
it is to our interest to preserve. 

Unfortunately not all Nietzsche's writings are 
of this same character — far from it: — some are 
little better than inconsequential ravings: and 
his nation seems of late to have neglected the 
sanity and assimilated the mania. His genius 
lay in expressing ideas so forcibly as to arrest 
attention, and it would have been quite possible 
for a nation with a sense of humour to disinter 
the buried meaning, to recognize a vivid truth 



86 THE WAR AND AFTER 

and an earnestness of purpose underlying his 
utterances, and to regard the form as a dramatic 
setting. The English nation has to some extent 
been able to discriminate in this way concern- 
ing its own more brilliant Nietzschian prophet, 
— who for instance tells us that if we value any 
truth we must be prepared to right for it, that 
if we had a proper horror of poverty we should 
treat it as a crime and exterminate it. 

The idea that heroism and strenuous exertion 
are appropriate in other fields than those of 
bodily battle inspire the following passage, 
which contains the most famous of all Neitzsche's 
maxims : — 

"I rejoice in all signs that a more manly, 
more warlike age is beginning, which will, 
before all things, bring bravery once more into 
repute! For it must prepare the way for a 
still loftier age, and store up the forces neces- 
sary to it, — that age which shall carry heroism 
into the domain of knowledge, and wage wars 
on behalf of ideas and their consequences. . . . 
Believe me, the secret of extracting the greatest 
profit and enjoyment from, existence is this: 
live dangerously! Build your cities on Vesuvius! 
Launch your ships on uncharted seas! Live at 
war with your equals and with yourselves! Be 
robbers and conquerors, ye enlightened ones, so 
long as ye cannot be rulers and possessors" {The 
Joyful Wisdom). 

And again, more paradoxically: — 

"Ye say a good cause will hallow even war? 
I say unto you it is the good war that halloweth 
every cause" (Zarathustra: "Of War and 
Warriors"). 



MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 37 

Such sentences — fine as they are — obviously 
lend themselves to misinterpretation. It is not 
easy to understand that any large body of 
people could be so stupid, but the Prussians 
managed it; and to realize their misreading 
of philosophic writers we have throughout to 
concentrate attention rather on the way that 
things are taken than on what was really meant. 

They seem to have misinterpreted their prophet 
until he became really mad; but still he carried 
them with him. To illustrate the violent things 
which they found possible to assimilate I regret 
to have to make abominable quotations, but 
it is necessary to exhibit and gibbet a few 
specimens. 

Speaking of the French Aristocracy before 
the French Revolution, and its overbearing 
attitude towards the peasants, Nietzsche justifies 
it thus: — 

"The essential point in a good and healthy 
aristocracy is that it shall not regard itself as a 
function of the commonwealth, but as its mean- 
ing and highest justification; that it should 
therefore accept with a good conscience the 
sacrifice of any number of men and women, who 
for its sake must be depressed below the stand- 
ard of humanity and reduced to slaves, to instru- 
ments. It must fundamentally believe that society 
ought not to exist for its own sake, but only as 
a foundation and scaffolding on the strength of 
which a selected race of beings may be able 
to devote themselves to their higher mission, and 
rise to a higher existence ,, (Beyond Good and 
Evil). 

And again: — 



38 THE WAR AND AFTER 

"At risk of wounding innocent ears, I lay 
down the principle that egoism is of the essence 
of the noble soul." So far he might be under- 
stood as referring to something like the divine 
egoism of the Gospel; but he goes on to ex- 
plain — "I mean the firm belief that to a 
being such as we are, other beings are by 
nature subject, and are bound to sacrifice them- 
selves." 

This is quite a Napoleonic tradition. It is 
well brought out by Bernard Shaw in his admir- 
able short play A Man of Destiny. In so far 
as a true aristocrat is the flower and glory of 
his race, there is much meaning in it, but its 
superficial meaning and immediate application 
are horrible. 

And all this anti-socialism can be easily 
twisted into an overbearing national insolence: 
witness the following effusion by Herr K. F. 
Wolff, in Pan-Germanische Blatter for Septem- 
ber 1914. 

"There are two kinds of races, master races 
and inferior races. Political rights belong to 
the master race alone, and can only be won by 
war. This is a scientific law, a law of biology. 
... It is unjust that a rapidly increasing master 
race should be struggling for room behind its own 
frontier, while a decadent inferior race can stretch 
its limbs at ease on the other side of that 
frontier. The inferior race should not be edu- 
cated in the schools of the master race, nor 
should any school be established for it, nor should 
its language be employed in public. [If it rebel], 
it is necessary to use the most violent means 
to crush such insurrection,— and not to encum- 



MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 39 

ber the prisons afterward! Thus the con- 
querors can best work for the annihilation of 
the conquered, and break for ever with the 
prejudice which would claim for a beaten race 
any right to maintain its nationality or its native 
tongue." 

A writer in the North American Review points 
out that: — 

"Here we see an easy but very significant 
transition has been effected. Nietzsche knew 
nothing of any master nation existing in the 
world to-day. His doctrine was that within all 
nations there was a master aristocracy, and a 
'herd' living in more or less disguised slavery. 
But Herr Wolff gaily transfers the 'Master' 
quality from individuals to a whole nation — the 
Germans — and the slave quality to a whole 
nation, manifestly the French, who have no right 
to 'stretch their limbs at ease on the other side 
of the frontier.' This is, of course, a misreading 
of Nietzsche, but it is a misreading to which he 
lends himself only too readily, and there is every 
reason to believe that it is a misreading very 
widely accepted in Germany." 

But Nietzsche himself launched into the ut- 
most violence of language before he had done, 
and in one of the wickedest of his books, Beyond 
Good and Evil, emphasizes his weird cult of self- 
ishness thus : — 

"The noble type of man feels himself to be 
the determiner of values; he looks for no ap- 
proval from others, but takes his stand on the 
judgment — 'What is hurtful to me is hurtful in 
itself; he knows it to be his prerogative to con- 
fer honour on things, to be a creator of values. 



40 THE WAR AND AFTER 

. . . Ruling-class morality is, however, particu- 
larly strange and disagreeable to the prevailing 
taste of the day, by reason of the sternness of 
its principle that one has duties only to one's 
equals: that one may act towards beings of a 
lower order, and toward everything that is foreign, 
just as seems good to one . . . and in any case 
'beyond good and evil' "... 

"We hold that hardness, violence, slavery, 
danger — and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, 
arts of temptation, and devilry of all kinds, — 
that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical, wild- 
beast-like and serpent-like in man, contributes 
to the elevation of the species 'man,' just as 
much as its opposite — and in saying this we do 
not even say enough. ... To refrain from 
mutual injury, from violence, from exploitation, 
to reduce one's will to a level with that of 
others . . . discloses itself as what it is — 
namely, a Will to the denial of life, a principle 
of dissolution and decay. One must resist all 
sentimental weakness: life in its essence is 
appropriation, injury, the overpowering of what- 
ever is foreign to us and weaker than ourselves, 
suppression, hardness, the forcing upon others 
of our own forms, the incorporation of others, 
or, at the very least and mildest, their exploita- 
tion." 

And in another book, called The Genealogy 
of Morals, we find that infamous passage about 
the "blond beast" so often referred to in 
connection with the ravaging of Belgium, which 
has been used to justify the instructions given 
to the licensed Prussian soldiery when at length 



MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 41 

they flung off the last traces of superficial civili- 
zation : — 

"Those very men who are so strictly kept 
within bounds by good manners, respect, usage, 
gratitude, and still more by mutual watchfulness, 
by jealousy inter pares, who, moreover, in their 
behaviour to one another show themselves so 
inventive in consideration, self-control, delicacy, 
loyalty, pride and friendship — those very men 
are to the outside world, to things foreign and 
to foreign countries, little better than so many 
uncaged beasts of prey. Here they enjoy 
liberty from all social restraint, . . . they revert 
to the beast of prey's innocence of conscience, 
and become rejoicing monsters, who perhaps go 
on their way, after a hideous sequence of 
murder, conflagration, violation, torture, with 
as much gaiety and equanimity as if they had 
merely taken part in some student gambols. 
. . . Deep in the nature of all these noble 
races there lurks unmistakably the beast of prey, 
the blond beast, lustfully roving in search of 
booty and victory. From time to time the beast 
demands an outlet, an escape, a return to the 
wilderness." 

The reason such conduct is resented is cyni- 
cally expounded thus : — 

"That the lambs should bear a grudge against 
the great birds of prey is in no way surprising; 
but that is no reason why we should blame the 
great birds of prey for picking up the little lambs. 
And if the lambs say among themselves, These 
birds of prey are evil; and whoso is as un- 
like as possible to a bird of prey, and as like as 
possible to its opposite, a lamb, shall we not call 



m THE WAR AND AFTER 

him good? One can have no objection to their 
setting up such an ideal, except that the birds 
of prey are likely to regard it rather mockingly, 
and to say, We bear no grudge against these 
good lambs; on the contrary, we love them — for 
nothing is more to our taste than a tender 
lamb/ " 

So we sometimes find the Germans now 
saying that while they hate England they love 
France and Belgium. Were it not that the 
fruits of this philosophy, planted in too rank a 
soil, had actually turned out so unexpectedly 
hideous, it might be laughed at as extravagant, 
and likened to the intention of a mother to make* 
her son a butcher because of his fondness for 
animals. 

But enough of this preposterous; madness! 
The main fault lay with the nation who drew 
sustenance from these ravings, and accepted them 
because of their correspondence with its own im- 
moral desires. 

In a series of Essays under the title of "The 
Comments of Bagshot" which were published in 
the Westminster Gazette during the years 1908 
and 1909, their writer realized very clearly how 
it was that the Germans were wresting philo- 
sophical teaching to their own ultimate destruction : 
it was because they found their literal form ex- 
pressive of the doctrines which their own selfish 
bigotry demanded. 

"Why all this pother about Nietzsche? This 
mad mystic, trying to make a philosophy out of 
the principles of the German General Staff, 
is only our own Carlyle carried to the ultimate 
logic of his Teutonic ideas, and if you will go 



MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 43 

to him yourself and read his books, instead of 
taking them secondhand in the bowdlerized ver- 
sions of his imitators, it will do you no more harm 
than a visit to the Zoological Gardens, where 
the Nietzschean principle is in full working 
order/ 7 

And in another place he goes on: — 

"The worst of Nietzsche is that none of the 
people who ought to read him will, and that for 
those who do read him he is virulent poison. 
Rightly construed, this surging anarchism of his 
is a revolt against the doctrine which the supermen 
have imposed upon the world, and a call to the 
lowly and meek to assert their manhood against 
their oppressors; and it is a singular perversion 
which makes it the gospel and the justification of 
the oppressor. But that is the nemesis of all 
teaching which seeks to cast out fire with fire. To 
the oppressed Nietzsche says, 'Go and be oppressors 
too' — which they never will be and never could be 
even if they wanted to be. It is utterly use- 
less to invite the pigeon to become a hawk 
or to tell St. Francis to turn himself into 
Napoleon." 

It is too late now, alas! to argue as to what 
relic of sense may underlie the Nietzschean 
ravings. Taken as his countrymen have taken 
them, and applied as their Professors have applied 
them — translating into intellectual terms and seek- 
ing to develop latent appetites and vices in the 
nation — they are manifestly devilish: and this fact 
it is which dooms them to extinction. 

So we happily revert to our own statesman- 
poet, Wordsworth: — 

"Everything which is desperately immoral, being 



44 THE WAR AND AFTER 

in its constitution monstrous, is of itself perish- 
able : decay it cannot escape ; and further it is liable 
to sudden dissolution. For he stands upon a hideous 
precipice (and it will be the same with all who may 
succeed to him and his iron sceptre) who has out- 
lawed himself from society by proclaiming, with 
word and act, that he acknowledges no mastery but 
power.'' 

If Germany were doomed to win this war, she might con- 
tinue^ — for how long, we cannot tell — to be the victim of a 
perverse ideal. But any Englishman who reveres and loves 
that soul of her which speaks in her music, philosophy, and 
poetry, must desire her total defeat for her own sake as well 
as for his country's and the world's. It is incredible that 
that soul is dead, and that anguish would not wake it from 
its evil dream. — A. C. Bradley. 



CHAPTER VII 

A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 

WE, unworthy, are agents of Higher 
Powers in this conflict. We are genu- 
inely and consciously fighting for the 
right. We have no other object than to keep 
humanity from falling below the state it has so 
far attained, and sinking back into the mire of 
merely animal materialism and brute force. We 
stand against the powers of evil, one of the cham- 
pions of Christendom, resisting decadence and up- 
holding spiritual faith. That is our strength and 
may yet be our salvation. 

There is no false pride in this statement, and 
there need be no false modesty. The day of 
trial has shown us both our faults and our 
virtues. Lamentably deficient in wisdom as 
we are, we do as a nation earnestly long for the 
triumph of the good. Heroism, virtue, and 
strength of character, really do appeal to us, 
and arouse not perfunctory but genuine enthu- 
siasm. Moreover, in some directions we are 
able to act up to our convictions: we 
strenuously desire to act fairly, and to give our 
foes and competitors an even chance; and on the 
whole we achieve this. It is not always 
so in the stress of competitive commerce; but as a 

45 



46 THE WAR AND AFTER 

national characteristic it is so: when we 
win, we wish to win by fair means not by foul. 
We have a sense of personal honour, and we 
have a healthy horror of gratuitous cruelty and 
savage revenge. We honour an upstanding 
foe, and we heartily desire to succour a defeated 
enemy. 

In all this we have often been misunderstood. 
It has sometimes been suggested that we must be 
acting from some ulterior base or cowardly motive, 
and often we have been accused of hypocrisy. 
But the charge is a false one. Hypocrisy is not a 
charge easy to controvert, yet as a matter of fact 
it is not one of our national vices. Instinc- 
tively shrinking from it, indeed, we often 
fall into the other extreme and refrain from 
putting forward our best motive. We do not 
resent the charge of a little more worldly 
wisdom than we really possess ; we rather like to 
be thought subtle, and resent being called simply 
good. Yet the latter charge is nearer to 
our national characteristics than the former, 
in spite of the fact that our conduct so 
often falls below our aspiration. Virtue vic- 
torious and vice vanquished is what really 
appeals to the heart of the people — even amid 
communities where, by the warpings of society or 
the weakness of the flesh, bad habits would seem 
to be theoretically as well as practically su- 
preme. 

Is all this true of our race alone and are these 
simple and childlike characteristics denied to other 
nations? God forbid. They are, let us hope and 
fully believe, characteristic of unwarped humanity. 
But unfortunately a part of humanity has, for the 



A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 47 

time, become warped by evil teachings; and the 
more docile and obedient it is the more disastrous 
is the result. 

A writer in the quarterly journal called Science 
Progress truly says that: — 

"We have witnessed the greatest crime ever 
perpetrated upon humanity. It is due in the first 
place to the wickedness or incompetence of those 
by whom the mass of men allow themselves 
to be ruled — the prince who pretends to possess 
the mandate of God, or the politicians who 
pretend to possess the mandate of the people; and 
secondly to the fact that, however far civilization 
has progressed, the mass of men still remain in- 
tellectually in but little better condition than 
they were in when they smote each other 
with sticks and hammered each other to death 
with stones." 

It is a curious coincidence that at this anniversary 
of the battle of Waterloo Europe should once again 
be contending with a Napoleonic idea of world 
dominion: this time in a more flagrant and even 
less pardonable form. The influence of the Na- 
poleonic spirit is by no means extinct, for as 
Professor Cramb wrote — and he did not live to 
see the present war, though he felt it was 
coming : — 

"The influence which Napoleon exercises 
upon modern German thought is peculiar and 
instructive. In Europe as a whole, in the 
twentieth century, two great spirit-forces con- 
tend for men's allegiance — Napoleon and 
Christ. The one, the representative of life- 
renunciation, places the reconciliation of life's 
discords and the solution of its problems in 



48 THE WAR AND AFTER 

a tranquil but nebulous region beyond the 
grave; the other, the asserter of earth and of 
earth's glories, disregardful of any life beyond 
the grave, finds life's supreme end in heroism 
and the doing of great things, and seeks no 
immortality except the immortality of renown; 
and even of that he is slightly contemptuous.* 
To Napoleon the end of life is power, and the 
imposing of his will upon the wills of other 
men. Like Achilles or like Ajax, ever to be the 
first and to outshine all other is his confessed 
ambition." 

Two Ideals 

Reduced to its elements this war is a war of 
ideals, a conflict between two ideals of govern- 
ment; — the English ideal of a commonwealth of 
nations, a group of friendly states, some larger 
some smaller, some stronger some weaker, but all 
working together and contributing each her quota 
for the good of humanity and the progress of the 
world ; — that is the ideal on the one hand ; — and on 
the other, the Prussian ideal of a single glorified 
state, dominating all others, enforcing its will 
despotically, imposing its customs, its learning and 
its culture on all the rest of the world. This ideal 
is that of a strong resolute autocracy, ruling all 
Europe, not with the consent of the governed, but 
in spite of their remonstrance and ignoring their 
dislike; a government so strong as to be able to 
crush all opposition, and to do away with 
all freedom except the freedom to do precisely as 
you are told; the replacement in fact of freedom 
by coercion. 



A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 49 

The fact is that, as Mr. Austen Chamberlain 
said in one of his speeches, 

"This is a struggle between two ideals of civili- 
zation and progress — whether the world is to 
be drilled and dragooned on the Prussian 
model, or whether the measured order and free- 
dom which has prevailed wherever the British flag 
flies is to triumph. " 

Their ideal, — drill, discipline, and docility, the 
three desiderata of government, — they must be- 
lieve in very strongly, or they would not sacrifice 
so much to enforce it. 

So long as they managed their own affairs in this 
way no one had a word to say; but when mis- 
sionary enterprise is attempted, our approval or 
disapproval becomes important. 

Mr. Harold Picton, writing with the object of 
promoting friendly feelings between the countries 
and stemming the torrent of hate which he feared 
might be reciprocated from our side, admits this 
freely, in spite of his partial admiration 
and whole-hearted good feeling for the German 
people, their efficiency, and their virtues. He 
says : — 

"In the past these matters have belonged to the 
internal affairs of Germany, and we have 
paid them but little heed. Now, however, that 
Germany proposes to extend her system to 
peoples comparatively free, her general methods 
of internal administration are a matter of grave 
concern for us all. Those methods as applied 
to others are shortly, 'Be German or be 
damned/ There are those who would rather be 
damned. This the German statesmen of to-day 
did not foresee. I have no contempt for 



SO THE WAR AND AFTER 

German individuality and character, — on the 
contrary, it attracts me; but when an individual 
begins to consider it his sacred duty to 
impose his individuality on others, he is on the 
high-road to a very disagreeable form of insanity. 
Only strong measures will effect a radi- 
cal cure." 

He admits also the meanness of the policy of 
half upholding an agreement and half withdrawing 
from it: — 

"What is low is to get the benefit of an agree- 
ment and also the benefit of breaking it. What was 
the method of the German statesmen? Up to the 
31st of July the German Ambassador gave Bel- 
gium to understand that her neutrality would be 
respected. On the 2nd of August the German 
Government demanded the immediate passage of 
German troops. Such a standard of honour would 
make enduring peace for ever impossible, for an 
enduring peace must depend upon agreements: 
it would make a brotherhood of nations for ever 
impossible, for any brotherhood must depend upon 
trust." 

But he realizes, as we all ought to realize 
clearly, the temptations and difficulties under which 
Germany labours by reason of its hedged-round 
geographical position. Whether it ought to feel 
suffocated or not, it does, in spite of our free 
trade and open door : and whether it has ever really 
felt alarmed about possible attack on one or other 
side — for it must know that its past history has 
not made it beloved — we need not be surprised at 
an occasional causeless panic, and at the should- 
ering of arms betimes against imaginary 
dangers : — 



A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 51 

"Let us, as Englishmen, imagine our land where 
Germany now is. Imagine the shifting suspicions 
of diplomacy on our land frontiers— the huge un- 
defined power of Russia on one hand, an unfriendly 
France on the other. Compulsory armament would 
be inevitable, and the cult of force might sink 
into our souls." 

This cult of force has planted Prussia astride of 
the neck of Germany : it has risen, and now it must 
perish, with the sword. 

The years 1866 and 1870 were the fatal years of 
Prussian supremacy and success. Up to that time 
German art, German science, German history, 
were admired and envied throughout the world. 
It had gloried in the era of Goethe, of Beethoven, 
and of Helmholtz. Since that date the great men 
of Germany have been few ; the decline then begun 
has continued. With some exceptions, no doubt, 
they have lost their public faith in unselfish action ; 
they officially disbelieve in chivalry; they deny any 
moral government of the world; they believe in 
the rule of the strongest. It is a thousand pities, 
for in physical science they have done wonders. 
Who does not remember the splendid achievements 
of Hertz — that brilliant follower of our own Clerk 
Maxwell — -whose all too early death saved him from 
the horrors of this disastrous epoch. E. Gold- 
schmidt has devised an ingenious extension on the 
practical side of Hertz's work. In mathematical 
physics Planck is a name of eminence. 

In Biology it is true Sir Ray Lankester speaks 
of the present German position with dispraise 
bordering on contempt. But in Mechanism and 
Chemicals and Apparatus the nation still ranks 
high; its scientific instruments and their design 



52 THE WAR AND AFTER 

are beautiful; it has devoted itself to the design 
and construction of appliances, specially those 
which can be used in war. Hitherto in peace time 
we have reaped the benefit of its instrument makers' 
well-instructed skill. Now we seem to be fighting 
a nation of machines. In war-material it is un- 
rivalled; in personnel it is lacking; its army is itself 
a machine — a devoted, terrible, obedient machine. 

To it we of the Allied Nations oppose Men, 
individual resource and character, the domination 
of personality — handicapped I fear by the rigidity 
of officials and by insufficient preparation. 

Determination there is on both sides; for not in 
biological metaphor, but in dire reality, it is a 
struggle for existence. The two ideals are in the 
field against each other; one must emerge trium- 
phant, the other must be defeated. There can be 
no halting between two opinions. It is a very 
ancient alternative; "If the Lord be God, follow 
Him; but if Baal, then follow him." There can 
be no peace till the prophets of Baal are extermi- 
nated, and the falseness of their creed displayed. 
Up and down, backwards and forwards, the fighting 
line may surge; but there can be only one end. Of 
this we should be well assured, while striving with 
all our might for its accomplishment. Towards this 
some are giving their lives, or the lives of those 
dear to them; others are giving of their substance: 
and this without stint, for if the cause of God is 
not triumphant, life on this planet will be no 
longer worth living. Death is preferable to German 
rule of the kind we should experience if conquered, 
and if the dormant national hate, fostered by lies 
and now fanned into a blaze, were set free on the 
vanquished. What has been done in Belgium 



A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 53 

would be done in England, and more also. The 
Belgian homes are an object lesson, clearly dis- 
playing the character and consequences of the 
Prussian ideal. 

Yet I must assume that the people themselves 
are not consciously evil, only diabolically mis- 
guided. For they too have an ideal, I grant them 
that: — one which has become deeply engrained, 
and has spread from Prussia to the rest of Ger- 
many, deceived as it has been, with the truth 
sedulously kept from it. There will be an awaken- 
ing; and already there must be many thousands 
who have not bowed the knee to Baal; who long 
for freedom as we do; and who in due time will 
make their voices heard. Amid the glamour of 
apparent success they cannot speak; but when dis- 
asters come, when they can no longer be concealed, 
and the nation learns how it has been befooled; 
when it realizes how it has befooled itself; then 
the wholesome elements in the nation will emerge, 
and will strike down the dominant party with 
execration and anathemas. 

For this conclusion we can bide our time. Inter- 
nal forces will work the necessary disruption, so 
long as we make no feeble, no hasty, no inconclusive 
peace. It is no time to talk of peace yet; nor will 
it be for long. Humanity cannot afford to forgo 
the gain to be derived from a struggle such as this ; 
nor can it run the risk of having such an awful 
conflict ever repeated. Now is the accepted time, 
now is the day of salvation. 

And fortunately the 'nations are united as never 
they have been before. So that a preparation is 
being made for friendly union among the nations 
of Europe, and ultimately for that federation of 



54 THE WAR AND AFTER 

the world to which prophets have been long looking 
forward. Many horrors, much aerial fighting, will 
precede that time. Tennyson foresaw it all. You 
remember how he 



Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a 

ghastly dew 
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue ; 



Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags 

were furl'd 
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. 

Yes, the federation of kindred and friendly 
nations, each with its own independent powers and 
aptitudes, its separate life and genius. So will our 
ideal of free institutions and self-respecting com- 
munities be fulfilled; — that settled policy of free 
government which has resulted in the loyal colonies 
and devoted daughter nations of the British 
Empire. 

The result of the struggle will be ultimately 
wholesome for all the nations concerned, including 
Germany; for what will be defeated will not be 
Germany, but a miserably wrong-headed philosophy 
of life. The Germany to which we owe so much 
science and learning and art will be re-born ; it will 
throw off the shackles of a cramping and over- 
powering despotism of evil: and once more, I sin- 
cerely trust, we shall be friends. 

As a sign of grace, let us bear in mind the fine 
testimony borne by the foe to that great and gallant 
soldier who had done his best, in face of obloquy, 
to prepare his own nation for the war which he felt 
was imminent. An obituary notice in a German 



A CONFLICT OF IDEALS 55 

paper contained the following: "Lord Roberts was 
an honourable, conspicuous, dangerous enemy, and 
an extraordinarily brave one; before such a man 
we lower our swords." 



CHAPTER VIII 

TWO tfAU,ACl3S 

THE errors or mistaken theories which 
are now supreme in Germany are: — first, 
a glorification of war, bas>ed on a 
misreading of Darwinism; and, second, an en- 
thronement of mere powefr, a belief in the 
unmoral supremacy of the State. They must 
be genuinely believed — even if to some extent 
believed to order — but they are desperate mis- 
takes. 

Fallacy No. i 

Consider them for a moment. First, a mis- 
reading of Darwinism; a misunderstanding of the 
phrase "struggle for existence" as conducive to 
evolution, so that slaughter and active con- 
flict seem the highest good. The Darwinian 
struggle is not of this order at all. It is 
a selection of the fittest to survive, among 
a crowd of organisms which cannot possibly 
all survive; a selection of those most fitted to 
the environment. It is akin to the natural 
competition and effort with which we are all ac- 
quainted in peace time; it is not like war 
at all. 

The expressions "struggle for existence" and 

56 



TWO FALLACIES 57 

"survival of the fittest," containing, as they do, a 
suggestion of conscious effort and of ethical signifi- 
cance, have been to some extent responsible for a 
certain amount of popular misconception. When 
we remember that the Darwinistic conception 
applies to the evolution of plants as well as of 
animals, we realize how absurd it is to think of 
it as akin to conscious fighting, or as anything 
more than a reaction against crowdedness, 
a mutual effort against severe conditions of 
life, or at most a struggle for food and light and 
air. 

Mutual effort I say, for there is much uncon- 
scious co-operation about the struggle, far more 
co-operation than is usually admitted. Not to 
speak of the obvious case of the social animals, who 
manifestly contribute to each other's welfare, nor 
of what there is still less need to mention, the 
sheer nobility of motherhood — which goes without 
saying as an example of loving help — we can adduce 
the interlocking of animals and plants in the 
economy of nature, and the inter-relation among 
animals so that by the sacrifice of some species 
others manage to live, as all illustrating a harmoni- 
ous and co-operating though unconsciously con- 
ducted scheme — as unconscious and instinctive as 
the service bees render to plants, and plants to 
bees. Thus it is that they all live together 
and prosper fairly, with numbers kept down 
to a reasonable level. The mutual depend- 
ence on each other is a sign of unconscious 
co-operation and mutual aid, rather than of 
hostility and warfare. The system is a simula- 
tion in the unconscious world of love as well 



58 THE WAR AND AFTER 

as of hate, and of self-devotion as well as 
of strife. 

But, apart from this, the facts on which the 
Darwinian theory is based are merely these: — 

(i) Organisms reproduce themselves and 
tend to increase in number. 

(2) The rate of reproduction is so great 
that it is impossible for all to survive. 

(3) Those survive, or tend to survive, 
whose special features are best adapted to 
their environment. 

(4) The special features or peculiarities of 
individuals tend to be transmitted to their 
descendants. 

(5) Hence the race gradually becomes 
better adapted to its surroundings, and 
accommodates itself to the prevailing con- 
ditions. 

(6) The environment therefore, in con- 
junction with the unalterable facts of here- 
dity, may be said to govern selection. 

It is round clauses (4) and (5) that most dis- 
cussion and controversy arise: and it is not likely 
that these simple statements solve the whole prob- 
lem of organic evolution, — far from it. But so 
far as they go they are undeniable, and the im- 
portant thing for us is the influence of environment, 
because that is really the only part over which we 
have any control. 

A writer in the Eugenics Review, Mr. T. G. 
Chambers, says: — 

"What has to be realized to-day — and this 
seems to me to be the great lesson to be learned 



TWO FALLACIES 59 

from a study of the principles of evolution— is 
that man has a very considerable power to 
determine what is to survive. If this be true 
a colossal responsibility rests upon man. He 
may by his actions cause to survive that which 
he knows to be good or that which he knows to 
be evil. By his influence upon environment 
he possesses a considerable control. He may 
create survival values. The beneficial effect 
of his influence in this direction will depend 
entirely upon his ethical principles. Just as man 
might, if he chose, breed hideous gruesome beasts 
by selection, and thus produce horrors, so he 
can by his influence over the environment 
of his own race give survival value to base and 
evil characteristics, and thus cause the deteriora- 
tion of the race. He is working within the laws 
of evolution. He may, on the other hand, 
so influence environment as to tend to give 
survival value to the highest and noblest 
characteristics, and thus, working within the 
same laws, he is raising the ethical standard 
of the race." 

So far as humanity alone is concerned the really 
helpful struggle for life is not that of the battle- 
field, but of the City, the workshop, and the home; 
the struggle for political and religious freedom, for 
reasonable leisure, for more domestic comfort; 
and above all the never ending striving towards a 
higher standard of conduct and greater nobility of 
soul. 

Fallacy No. 2 

The second error is the absolute enthronement 
of material power; the blasphemous notion that 



60 THE WAR AND AFTER 

nothing higher than the State exists, and that 
there is no moral law, human or divine, to which 
the strongest State is subject; nothing above its 
own conception of what is beneficial to itself. 
Expediency thus becomes the supreme guide; all 
other considerations are signs of weakness and 
timidity; the sole national virtue is power to 
execute what it intends; the one fatal sin is de- 
ficiency of power. If any given State is supremely 
strong, there exists no power above it; it is free 
to execute its own behests, and to dominate and 
coerce the world. 

This pernicious doctrine, the genesis of which we 
dealt with in Chapter VI, is what must be over- 
thrown; and so great is the importance of the 
final demonstration of its falsity that a heavy price 
is being paid for it, in suffering and death. 
In no other way could the conviction of error 
be so thoroughly burnt into the conscience of 
humanity. 

And the conditions for the proof are sound. No 
one will be able to say that the German nation 
was weak, that it was caught unprepared, that it 
had not every advantage which the appliances and 
discoveries of the nineteenth century could grant 
it. In all adventitious and material ways it had 
immensely the advantage. It chose its own time, 
and it struck with vigour, determination, and 
enthusiasm. Only on the spiritual, the immaterial 
side, was it deficient; and so the conscience of 
humanity has risen up against it, and it will be 
defeated. 

The whole strength of every enlightened nation, 
and of every individual in the nation, must com- 
bine to resist it. And if England is in the van, 



TWO FALLACIES 61 

as it is in the forefront of the battle; if it draw 
upon itself, as it is doing, the hatred and fierce 
antagonism of the powers of evil; so much the 
more joyful and hopeful for the England of the 
future. It will come out of the struggle braced and 
invigorated, and renewed in the spirit of its 
mind. 

We needed this effort, and this sacrifice of ease 
and prosperity; but the sinews of the na- 
tion are still sound. She has seen dark days 
before; indeed, as Emerson says, she has "a kind 
of instinct that she sees a little better in a cloudy 
day." 

And those who are young have the joy of taking 
part in the struggle, and will reap the fruits of 
the great national experience henceforth through- 
out their lives. Let them see to it that they make 
use of their opportunities and have nothing to 
regret when the trial is over, when victory super- 
venes and peace reigns once more. Other less 
obvious opportunities there will always be, when 
these exceptional ones are gone: that is true: but 
lost opportunities never return. 



CHAPTER IX 

GERMANY AND ENGLAND ; GERMAN ATTITUDE 

Fas est et ab hoste doceri 

IT is not waste of time to study the character 
of an alien civilization if it is sufficiently like 
our own to enable us to learn something from 
it — even if we gather from it only caution and 
warning. From Germany we have much to learn, 
both in the positive and the negative direction. In 
the past we have been trying to assimilate the 
good. In the present we must also take warning 
by the bad. 

The British idea that every citizen is entitled 
to express his opinion on politics has no doubt its 
ludicrous side, but it is also a safeguard. Instinct 
may be wiser than knowledge in some cases, and it 
is to be presumed that the average man is governed 
by a sort of instinct, since he certainly cannot have 
much knowledge. Undoubtedly, however, he 
ought to have more, and that is one reason 
why W.E.A. and other Labour movements in 
the direction of self -education are so im- 
portant. 

It is also the chief reason why the Country 
should be kept better informed. Self-sacrificing 
action cannot be expected merely on a basis 
of gossip and uncertainty. The information, 

62 



GERMANY AND ENGLAND 63 

both about facts and about policy, which 
privately spreads among politicians and is thus 
presumably accessible occasionally to highly 
placed enemies, should be more widely and 
definitely disseminated; as it is in France, where 
the Government — more clearly and logically 
recognizing the fact of democracy — takes the 
people into its confidence. Common rumour is fal- 
lacious and slanderous at times, and too little 
gratitude is felt for those who are bearing a serious 
National burden. But, on the whole, one instinct 
that I hope our race is acquiring is not to believe in 
lies, however insistently they are told us, but to 
read between the lines and judge of the facts for 
ourselves. This instinct seems not to exist in 
Germany, where the people swallow lies like chil- 
dren who have never run the gauntlet of a Public 
School; where it is said that in the first term 
new boys believe everything that is told them, in 
the second term disbelieve everything, and in the 
third term begin to discriminate between 
truth and falsehood. The Germans seem to 
be in their first term; and until they have 
learnt wisdom by bitter experience they are 
a danger and menace to the world. Their 
great Army is like a first-class revolver in 
the hands of a clever but mischevious child. 
Their old child-like strength and simplicity 
are now spoiled — let us hope not irretrievably 
spoiled. At present "the Germans, having 
made up their minds to be a nation of the world, 
are overdoing it with a German thoroughness. 
They have tried," says Mr. Clutton-Brock in his 
Thoughts on the War, "they have tried to learn 
wisdom like industrious scholars, but, being a 



64 THE WAR AND AFTER 

people naturally simple, they have chosen the worst 
possible teachers. They went to the Prussians and 
said to them, Make us a nation ' of the 
world; and the Prussians, for their own 
purposes, did their best, or their worst, with 
them. 

"Prussia has gained her power over Germany 
because she is more utterly worldly than any other 
nation. We and the French have been worldly 
enough, but we have always known that 
there was another world. Prussia has never 
known that; — or, rather, the other world 
for her, if it exists at all, is just the same as 
this one, except that it is more favourable to 
Prussia. And the Germans, diffident, wavering, 
and credulous in matters of the world, have been 
overawed by her narrow certainty. They saw that 
the Prussians, far more stupid than themselves, 
had gained power; and they went to Prussia to 
learn the secret of it. So she taught them that 
all the German virtues, moral and intellectual, 
had been wasted hitherto because they had 
not been used in the service of Germany. Ger- 
man thought, German virtue, German culture must 
now be all as proudly and consciously German as 
the German Army, and, like that, must be or- 
ganized for victory. The Prussians taught this 
because they did not understand the German vir- 
tues ; and the Germans learned it because they were 
still children and Prussia seemed to them to be 
grown up." 

Many Englishmen who have been accustomed 
to remember with pride their German training, 
and who still regard the people of that country 
with affectionate concern, have had to speak in 



GERMANY AND ENGLAND 65 

sad accents lately. Professor Sully, writing in 
the Hibbert Journal, recently described his ex- 
periences as a student in Gottingen in and about 
the year 1867 — i.e. before the Franco-Prussian 
War — and mentions some of the characteristics 
which then struck him, thus : — 

"One feature common to both sexes which struck 
me particularly was an unwillingness to trespass 
upon what is a main field of conversation 
for English people, namely, politics. We 
soon learned that this reticence was not wholly 
due to the strong feeling aroused by the recent 
annexation of Hanover to Prussia. The German 
habit of leaving the officials to settle what is best 
for the country seemed to us to be only one illus- 
tration of the general belief in the expert, in 
everybody's having his special domain of knowledge 
his Pach, outside of which he should be chary 
of offering his opinion. With this respect for 
the expert there seemed to associate itself 
a dull uniformity of opinion about men, 
books, and other things, and an apparent 
timidity in expressing views of a marked individu- 
ality. Even in those days one could see the 
tendency of the Germans to allow their minds to 
be 'over-drilled.' " 

And Professor W. J. Ashley also, who received 
not long ago an Honorary Degree from Berlin, 
says, on a basis of experience subsequent to 
1870:— 

"In academic circles the legitimate pride in 
German science seemed sometimes to have become 
almost an obsession, and to have the effect of shut- 
ting out of sight what was being done in other 
lands. It seemed to be hardly realized that what 



66 THE WAR AND AFTER 

Germany had to teach the western world in the 
way of thoroughness and method had already been 
pretty well learnt, and that there were intellectual 
qualities of almost equal value, qualities of lucidity 
and discrimination and balance, which could per- 
haps be better learnt elsewhere — even in the 
despised France. There was a curious national 
self-satisfaction which failed to perceive that the 
great new ideas, the waves of intellectual 
inspiration within and without the realm of 
scholarship and research, which were affecting the 
minds of this generation all over the world, were 
now almost all of them coming from other direc- 
tions than Germany. Again, it is enough to turn 
to France, and mention such names as Pasteur and 
Rodin and Loisy and Bergson. 

"The word for it all, I am afraid I must say, 
is simply 'conceit/ But then [he goes on] I have 
reflected that there have been times when we 
ourselves were similarly difficult to get on with. 
I suppose nobody, at this time of day, would say 
that Palmerston was positively ingratiating in 
his dealings with other countries; and if we want 
to see how confined was the outlook of the 
middle- Victorian Englishman we have but to 
go back to . . . Thackeray's unconscious ex- 
emplifications. And as I believed that England 
had become a little more tolerant, a little less 
self -pleased, a little less heavy-handed than in 
Palmerston's time, so I hoped that the German 
phase of self-glorification and disregard for the 
feelings of others would also pass away, with- 
out a great cataclysm. I was mistaken; but I 
am not ashamed of having ascribed to Ger- 



GERMANY AND ENGLAND 67 

many a reserve of statesmanship and cool sense 
which it is now apparent it did not possess." 

Many of us could say the same about our 
friendly admiration for what we thought was 
Germany. The revelation has been appalling. 

The Editor of the Hibbert Journal, in April 
191 5, thus summarizes both Germany's strength 
and weakness: — 

"Germany is, and has long been, the great 
head-centre of the critical movement in all its 
departments. She has turned her critical faculty 
on the problems of society and has developed 
an industrial and military organization which 
for theoretical completeness is without a rival. 
She has created a social machine which can 
be set working by the pressure of a button; 
but, through her constant oversight of the 
human element, she has left the button at the 
mercy of the most dangerous element in the 
State. 

"While there is no nation which thinks so 
much as the German, there are many which 
enjoy more freedom of thought. Her thought 
is standardized, and the expert controls its 
direction throughout an immense variety of 
products. Once the most creative of nations, 
she has now become the least. Her originality 
is mainly of one kind: she makes new departures 
in criticism and invents, or borrows, new ma- 
chines — social, industrial, military, philosophical, 
and religious. Nowhere else is psychology so 
much studied, and human nature so little under- 
stood." 

Thus the misunderstandings between England 
and Germany are not superficial but deep seated. 



68 THE WAR AND AFTER 

They do not merely involve questions of com- 
mercial interests, but they are rooted in a 
conflict of principles and ideals. Dr. Sarolea 
in 1912 predicted that if a war between the 
two countries did break out, it would not be 
merely an economic war, like the colonial wars 
between France and England in the eighteenth 
century; rather would it partake of the nature 
of a political and religious crusade, like the 
French wars of the Revolution and the Empire. 
The strain between England and Germany, he 
implies, is part of the old conflict between 
Liberalism and despotism, between industrialism 
and militarism, between progress and reaction, 
between the masses and the classes. One nation 
believes in political liberty and national 
autonomy, its Press is free and the rulers are 
responsible to public opinion; whereas in the 
other nation public opinion is still muzzled or 
powerless, and the masses are still under the 
heel of an absolute government, a reactionary 
party, a military Junkertum, and a despotic 
bureaucracy. The root of the evil in Germany 
lies in the fact that in Germany the war spirit 
and the war caste still prevail, and that a mili- 
tary Power like Prussia is the predominant 
partner in the German Confederation. 

The fact is that the old policy of Frederick 
the Great survives in Prussia to this day. It is 
true that he still governs Prussia. Of Frederick, 
Bernhardi says: — 

"The aggrandizement of his territory had 
become a necesssity, if Prussia wanted to exist 
on a business footing and bear its royal name 
with honour. The king saw this political neces- 



GERMANY AND ENGLAND 69 

sity, and took the bold decision to challenge 
Austria. None of the wars which he waged 
were forced upon him. None did he postpone 
to the last extremity. Always he reserved it 
to himself to initiate the attack, to forestall his 
adversaries, and to secure the most favourable 
chances. ,, 

Compare with this attitude what Bernhardi 
advised in 191 1 about policy to-day, and about 
the best method of concealing the nature of 
what would really be a war of aggression: — 

"If we did attack either France or Russia, 
the other would be compelled to come to the 
rescue, and we should find ourselves in a much 
worse position than if we had only to combat 
one adversary. It must therefore be the duty 
of our diplomacy so to shuffle the cards as to 
compel Prance to attack us. We might then 
expect that Russia would remain neutral. 

"One thing is certain, we shall not get 
France to attack us by mere passive waiting. 
Neither France nor Russia nor England need 
attack us to obtain what they want. As long 
as we are afraid to be the aggressors, they can 
gain all they need from us by diplomatic means, 
as has been proved by the recent Moroccan events. 
Hence, if we wish to bring about an attack on 
the part of our enemies we must initiate a political 
action which, without attacking France, yet will 
hurt her interests and those of England so 
severely that both States will feel obliged to 
attack us. The possibilities for such a procedure 
present themselves in Africa as well as in 

Europe." 



70 THE WAR AND AFTER 

Commenting in 19 12 upon this free-spoken 
utterance, Dr. Sarolea says: — 

"The General has spoken with the frankness 
of a soldier, and not with the reticence of a 
diplomat. The British people will be grateful 
to the gallant soldier for his candour, however 
cynical. They will remember some of his 
admissions and some of his indiscretions, and 
[warned by these] they will perhaps be less 
inclined henceforward to political optimism — less 
inclined to assume that the present differences 
between Germany and England are to be removed 
by international courtesies, by Parliamentary 
visits and banquets, or that difficulties will be 
solved by a policy of passive acquiescence and 
blissful repose." 

Alas! we of the general English public knew 
too little of what was being hatched behind the 
scenes, and did not trust the clear-sighted vision 
of our prophets. 

For a time ingenious and organized deceit 
appears to answer, in a world accustomed to fair 
dealing; but now at length the atrocious false- 
hoods and lying diplomacy by which Prussian 
representatives seek to deceive neutral nations 
have overreached themselves. Their deeds 
have drowned their words, and the reaction of 
neutral nations, especially of America, can be 
expressed in those words of Emerson: "What 
you are speaks so loudly, we cannot hear 
what you say." 

Still we may be puzzled as to why they take 
all this trouble, and why they detest us so much. 
For one thing, they are hideously annoyed with 
our successful colonization, and think that they 



GERMANY AND ENGLAND 71 

could do the same with the same opportunities. 
If they could, then presumably they would al- 
ready have done so; but as Governors of 
Colonies they have been complete failures, and 
not a population desires to be under their thumb. 
So they think they can mend matters by whole- 
sale robbery and by taking colonies, as going 
concerns, from other people. 

Dr. Sarolea, with his usual acumen, hits off 
the position exactly: — 

"The final responsibility must be traced to 
the political and moral shortcomings of the 
German people themselves. After all, success- 
ful colonization, as distinguished from the old 
predatory Imperialism, is the fruit of political 
freedom, of individual initiative, of a spirit of 
adventure and enterprise; and until recently the 
German people were lacking in every one of 
those qualities. 

"Germany is not really a nation of colonists 
in the exact sense of the word, for a colonist 
is a man who settles in a new land, and a man 
who settles in a new land must be a pioneer 
and an adventurer. Now the German does not 
like to settle in a new land; he is so accus- 
tomed to passive obedience that he does not 
succeed in those new countries where initiative 
is the first quality required. He generally prefers 
to go to old settled countries, like the United 
States, or Brazil, (or Australia), which have 
already an organized government." 

Baron von Hiigel sums up the weakness 
of Germans, regarded as colonizers, very 
clearly : — 

"It is precisely where the Prussianized German 



72 THE WAR AND AFTER 

attains to supreme power, that his defects show 
and tell. 'Live and let live/ — patience, toler- 
ance, geniality, comradeship, trust, generosity; 
the willingness, the desire, to see races, social 
organizations, religions, subtly different from our 
own, developing, each at its best, in an atmos- 
phere of large tolerance; with the benefit of the 
doubt (where the State appears endangered by 
such tolerance) always given in favour of the 
liberty and responsibility of these various in- 
dividuals and complexes, — all this is funda- 
mentally necessary for successful colonial rule, 
and this is not necessarily associated with 
manufacturing and mercantile (and military) 
gifts. 

"It is no accident that England, a great 
colonial Power, is not a great military Power, 
and that it holds India with, comparatively, 
a handful of European troops. You are hardly 
likely to possess both gifts and tastes to a 
high degree; and you will, in any case, find 
that an intense militarism profoundly hinders, 
and does not help, a wholesome colonial rule. 
Recent Germany, unfortunately for us all, thinks 
that not only are these things, at their intensest, 
thoroughly compatible, but that the one neces- 
sarily furnishes the might, and hence the right, 
to the other." 

Thus the mere fact that we succeed, by ap- 
parently casual methods, where they fail by 
highly elaborated officialism, is a cause of much 
irritation, and has helped to engender an orga- 
nized feeling of hate. Baron von Hiigel goes 
on to say, — 

"The bitterness felt by so many home 



GERMANY AND ENGLAND 73 

Germans against the English successes amongst 
foreign and native races, is doubtless greatly 
intensified by the English appearing to the Ger- 
man to succeed as it were in play, — as cricketers 
and golfers, as 'good fellows' who, with a 
school and university education of little con- 
centration, and with, say, some six hours of 
office work, comparatively simple administrative 
machinery, and small bodies of military, succeed 
where he fails. These Britishers are mostly 
not theoretical at all, they possess loosely knit 
minds and moderate passions. The German 
works intensely, systematically, preparing every- 
thing; and yet his complex bureaucracy, his 
militarist self-repression, his huge plans, lead 
to little or nothing. Thus the 'flannelled fool' 
utterly out-distances the iron will and fierce 
labour of highly trained specialists. Hogarth's 
Idle Apprentice, unjustly yet quite understand- 
ably, envied the solid successes of the Indus- 
trious Apprentice. But would not the Industrious 
Apprentice grow wildly bitter if the Apprentice 
who seemed to him Idle, at least as com- 
pared with himself, somehow carried off one 
great solid success after the other from under 
his very eyes?" 

Yes, it must be aggravating; and it would be a 
great mistake for us to pride ourselves on our 
foolishness, as if it were that and not some 
less obtrusive real merit — especially the spirit of 
recognized and permitted freedom— which has 
given us success as pioneers. Once beyond the 
pioneering stage the Germans have much to 
teach us; and if only they had fought fairly 
and honourably we could have sympathized with 



745 THE WAR AND AFTER 

them, and should have felt genuinely like friends 
who possess different aptitudes and powers — 
each admiring the other. They make excellent 
colonists under the freedom of British institu- 
tions. Settlers in Australia, for instance, by 
no means hanker for a return to Prussian, 
officialdom. German interests were in no danger, 
they had a perfectly open door for their com- 
merce, and the meritorious part of their civiliza- 
tion was spreading: if only they had not been 
too hasty and too greedy and too determined on 
territorial expansion at the expense of thriving 
neighbours. 



CHAPTER X 

ENGLAND AND GERMANY! ENGLISH 
ATTITUDE 

WHATEVER German intentions may be 
or may have been with respect to terri- 
torial expansion, it is quite certain 
that no considerations of that kind explain our 
entry into the war. Fortunately for us the 
British Interest note has never been sounded 
in the present case — beyond the vital need for 
defence — and we are working whole-heartedly 
and disinterestedly with our Allies. It is most 
true, as Edward Lyttelton has said, that "from 
the outset of this grim business Britons have 
been nerved to do and die because they have 
set themselves to vindicate principles which are 
to us and to all men, though some see it not, 
of infinitely greater value than any power or 
prestige or Empire." 

The deeply-engrained and unanimous horror 
of the English-speaking race at the main inter- 
national crime which was initially committed by 
our foes is thus expressed by our good friend 
of American birth, Henry James: — 

"Personally," he says, "I feel so strongly on 
everything that the war has brought into question 
for the Anglo-Saxon peoples, that humorous 

75 



76 THE WAR AND AFTER 

detachment or any other thinness or tepidity of 
mind on the subject affects me as vulgar impiety, 
not to say as rank blasphemy; our whole race- 
tension became for me a sublimely conscious 
thing from the moment Germany flung at us 
all her explanation of her pounce upon Belgium 
for massacre and ravage in the form of the most 
insolent 'Because I choose to, damn you all!' 
recorded in history/' 

So it is that the noblest of our youth have 
enrolled themselves for the necessary work of 
war, whether at home or abroad; and many, 
alas, of the flower of humanity on both sides 
have succumbed. The death of Mr. Glad- 
stone's grandson, successor to the Hawarden 
estate, inheritor of a great name, and himself 
of brilliant political promise, has struck 
England with singular poignancy; and the 
words which the Grand Old Man used, in 1870, 
about the cause to which this country has now 
pledged its honour and the lives of its soldiers, 
may well be recalled: — 

"We felt called upon to enlist ourselves on 
the part of the British nation as advocates and 
as champions of the integrity and independence 
of Belgium. And if we had gone to war we 
should have gone to war for freedom, we should 
have gone to war for public right, we should 
have gone to war to save human happiness 
from being invaded by tyrannous and lawless 
power. That is what I call a good cause, 
gentlemen. And though I detest war, — and 
there are no epithets too strong, if you could 
supply me with them, that I will not endeavour 
to heap upon its head, — in such a war as that, 



ENGLAND AND GERMANY 77 

while the breath in my body is continued to me, 
I am ready to engage. I am ready to support 
it, I am ready to give all the help and 
aid I can to those who carry this country into 
it." 

Forty-five years later the readiness of his and 
of many another noble family has been tested, 
and has rung true. 

So we have stood up for the integrity of 
the smaller nations against a European bully: 
knowing that we should suffer much strain and 
loss, but throwing ourselves into the struggle 
in accordance with our pledged word, without 
counting the cost. 

Happy are all free nations, too strong to be dispossessed, 
But blessed are they among nations, that dare to be strong 
for the rest. 

But that is not how our attitude appears 
to our foes, nor ever has appeared. Professor 
Cramb, explaining German views of England 
long before ever the present war began, speaks 
of the hostility to England then prevalent, and 
says that in the great historian Professor von 
Treitschke, — whose lectures in Berlin were 
crowded with the elite of that capital, — antago- 
nism reaches a height and persistence of rancour 
or contempt which in so great a man is arresting 
if not unique. For him the greatness of England 
passed with the seventeenth century, with Crom- 
well and Milton. 

People who fail to understand us may 
regard us as hypocritical. We are weak, and 
fall below our ideals, but we are not hypocrites. 
Hypocrisy is not indeed very common; it is not 



78 THE WAR AND AFTER 

an English vice at all. The conduct of some 
Englishmen has thrown scorn upon the lofty 
attitude of others; and it is a matter of too 
common and painful experience that at different 
times, even in the same individual, religious emo- 
tion is not inconsistent with debased acts. 
Humanity is a complex thing, and not only the 
same nation but the same individual may say one 
thing and do another; thereby of course bringing 
some discredit on his religious convictions, and 
enabling his practice to be thrown up against his 
preaching. But in spite of weaknesses of that 
kind, King David was not a hypocrite. 

The Prussian theory deprecates the subjuga- 
tion of one's own will to any higher and nobler 
purpose; it cannot understand the kind of Divine 
service that is perfect freedom; it would re- 
pudiate Tennyson's aspiration after the highest 
kind of self-will: — 

Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 

Is an attitude like that weakness? Is that 
hypocrisy? A thousand times, No! 

Grounds of Disuke 

But though it is true that we have not been 
liked, even our good attributes having been, mis- 
conceived and mistrusted, the Germans have been 
disliked still more. This fact, steeped as they 
are in self-admiration, seems to come to them 
as a surprise. They try to court the approval 
of neutral nations, to deprecate any rebuke for 
their conduct; and they regard hostility, or even 



ENGLAND AND GERMANY 79 

lukewarmness of approbation, as undeserved and 
hurting to their feelings. They go about saying, 
in the sense if not the words of Gilbert and 
Sullivan's Opera, Princess Ida — 

And everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man, 
And I can't think why ! 

Well, considering their history, the widespread 
dislike is not really surprising. Dr. Qarolea 
estimated the reason clearly enough: — 

"Wherever German power has made itself felt 
for the last forty years — in Italy and Austria, 
in Russia and Turkey — it has countenanced re- 
action and tyranny. In politics Germany is to-day 
what Austria and Russia were in the days of 
the Holy Alliance, the power of darkness. 
Whilst in the provinces of science and art the 
German people are generally progressive, in poli- 
tics the German Government is consistently 
retrogressive. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized 
and repeated that, more than any other State — 
more even than Russia — Prussia stands in the 
way of political advance. It was Prussia that 
helped to crush the Polish struggle for freedom 
in 1863; when, a few years ago, English public 
opinion was protesting against the Armenian 
massacres, the Kaiser stood loyally by Abdul 
Hamid and propped his tottering throne; when 
the Russian Liberals were engaged in a life- 
and-death struggle with Czardom, the Kaiser 
gave his moral support to Russian despotism. 
It is not too much to say that it is the evil 
influence of Prusso-Germany alone which keeps 
despotism alive in the modern world." 

And, again,- — 



80 THE WAR AND AFTER 

"Prussia owes whatever she is, and whatever 
territory she has, to a systematic policy of 
cunning and deceit, of violence and conquest. 
No doubt she has achieved an admirable work 
of organization at home, and has fulfilled what 
was perhaps a necessary historic mission, but 
in her international relations she has been 
mainly a predatory Power. She has stolen her 
Eastern provinces from Poland; she is largely 
responsible for the murder of a great civilized 
nation. She has wrested Silesia from Austria. 
She has taken Hanover from its legitimate 
rulers. She has taken Schleswig-Holstein from 
Denmark, Alsace-Lorraine from France. And 
to-day [this was written in 1912] the military 
caste in Prussia trust and hope that a final 
conflict with England will consummate what 
previous wars have so successfully accomplished 
in the past. 

"The German of to-day still wants to rise 
and to soar; no longer in order to sow broad- 
cast the seeds of ideas from the high altitudes 
of speculation, but rather to throw down bombs 
and explosives." Yes, "a season of calm weather" 
our prophets, Plotinus and Tennyson and 
Wordsworth, have taught us to associate with 
spiritual vision and angels' visits: Materialism 
bids us, at these periods, look out for Zeppelins. 
And the dove, which by mystical writers and 
artists had been used as a symbol for the Holy 
Ghost, has become a Taube! 

But let us always distinguish between Prussia 
and the rest of Germany. True, the rest of 
Germany has subordinated itself to Prussia, 
which has the ultimate political, financial and 



ENGLAND AND GERMANY 81 

military control, but their doing so has been a 
fearful mistake and one which will yet cost 
them dear. 

An American point of view was indicated by 
an editorial in the New York Times: — 

"The world cannot, will not, let Germany 
win in this war. With her domination over all 
Europe, peace and security would vanish from 
trie earth. ... A few months ago, the world 
only dimly comprehended Germany, now it 
knows her thoroughly: Germany is doomed to 
sure defeat. Yet the doom of the German Empire 
may become the deliverance of the German 
people if they will betimes but seize and hold 
their own." 

"The German people are slandering them- 
selves when they lay themselves prostrate before 
the sword and the peaked helmet of the Hohen- 
zollern monarchy. They are not predestined 
for all time to come to be the utterly incapable 
politicians which they profess to be. They 
are not an essentially 'unpolitical' race doomed 
to anarchy, and the Prussians are not the 
imperial race predestined to supremacy. Indeed, 
in political capacity the Southern Germans are 
far more gifted than the Prussians. Their 
traditions of municipal government are as su- 
perior to the bureaucratic traditions of Prussia 
as the genius of liberty is superior to the genius 
of despotism. No country can boast of a more 
glorious civic history than the free Gdrman 
cities of the South and of the East." — So says 
Dr. Sarolea. 

The following characteristic extract from 



82 THE WAR AND AFTER 

Carlyle serves to describe the typical official 
Prussian : — 

"Examine the man who lives in misery because 
he does not shine above other men; who goes 
about producing himself, pruriently anxious 
about his gifts and claims; struggling to force 
everybody, as it were, begging everybody for 
God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and 
set him over the heads of men! Such a creature 
is among the wretchedest sights seen under the 
sun. A great man? A poor, prurient, empty 
man; fitter for the ward of a hospital than for a 
throne among men. I advise you to keep out of 
his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; un- 
less you will look at him, wonder at him, write 
paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the 
emptiness of the man, not his greatness." 

Do not let us abuse an individual, but only 
a type. An individual may be a figure-head, 
and so attract to himself both glory and dis- 
honour; but a human personality is a strange 
mixture, it contains elements of good and bad, — 
and human judgment, based necessarily on im- 
perfect knowledge, is very fallible — but we may 
sympathetically admit that a strong personality 
set up on a pinnacle is in a difficult and 
dangerous position, from which if he fall he 
falls like Lucifer never to rise again. 



PART II: THE PRESENT 

"The accepted time" 



Therefore take heed how you impawn our person, 
How you awake our sleeping sword of war: 
We charge you, in the name of God, take heed ; 
For never two such kingdoms did contend 
Without much fall of blood ; whose guiltless drops 
Are every one a woe, a sore complaint, 
'Gainst him whose wrongs give edge unto the swords 
That make such waste in brief mortality. 

Shakespeare, Henry V. 



PART II: THE PRESENT 

CHAPTER XI 

"S.O.S." 

WHAT IS THE WAR FOR? 

HUMANITY has much to contend with; it 
is set in the midst of tremendous forces 
■ — surrounded by many and great dangers 
— and is itself full of infirmity; contemplation 
of their evil case has before now driven men 
to pessimism or to despair. All our mutual 
help and tolerance are needed for the conduct 
of life. We have learned to be sensitive to the 
grief and pain of others, to shrink from sights 
of bodily suffering and to do our best at any 
cost to relieve it. When earthquakes or ship- 
wrecks or railway accidents occur, we stand 
horrified, and sometimes mistrust Providence. 
To bring such catastrophes about on purpose 
is unthinkable. 

How then can the present state of Europe 
be credible, or other than a ghastly nightmare? 
All the resources of civilization and science 
utilized, and all the manhood of the nations 
busily engaged, either in preparing machinery 
for inflicting torture and death, or else in em- 
ploying them for this hellish purpose! 

Nor is the suffering limited to the wounded 
alone. The links of affection which bind one 

85 



86 THE WAR AND AFTER 

human being to another afford further oppor- 
tunity for exquisite torture. The premature 
breakage of such links, and the agonized fear of 
friends for those exposed to the danger, give 
scope and room enough for a cry to the heavens, 
of magnitude such as cannot have ascended in 
any previous epoch of the world's history. 

Collect the utterances of pain and grief and 
heroism throughout antiquity: they would have 
to be multiplied manyfold before they reach in 
volume the agonized supplications rising from 
the far more numerous and tenderly nurtured 
humanity of to-day. Bereavement is wide- 
spread. The voice of weeping is heard through 
all the lands: soon in every family there must 
be one dead. 

It is a terrible time for women, for all 
mothers and wives on whom the blow has fallen 
or soon may fall. The pain may take the form 
of a dazed bewilderment — and no wonder — for 
there never yet was a more meaningless, a more 
diabolical, stroke. Here is an expression of it 
which in simple form may represent the feeling 
of thousands:— 

WIDOWED IN SPRING. 1 

The lattice of the naked boughs is turning into lace 
As little buds, like cunning knots, a growing pattern trace. 
Across a sky of April blue the swallows wheel and chase, 
But Nature's beauty sickens me when I only want his face 
again His honest, ugly face. 



1 1. M. P. in the Westminster Gazette for the evening be- 
fore the ist of May, 1915. So Victor Hugo in exile : 

Le moi de mai, sans la France, 
II n'est plus le mois de mai. 



"S.O.S." 87 

I draw no comfort from the warmth of springtime in the 
land, 

For there is winter in my heart and round my head a band 

Of burning frost that numbs my brain. ... I do not under- 
stand 

Why Death should take my man from me ere I could clasp 
his hand again — 

His strong, protecting hand. 

Yes, the shot crashes into human souls as well 
as into human bodies; the guns reach far. As 
Harold Begbie says, — 

"A battlefield is only the outline of War. 
Fill it up with agonizing anxiety, with burn- 
ing prayers, with maddening sleeplessness, with 
tears and sobs and groans; fill it up with the 
heart's capacity for utmost grief and sharpest 
pain; fill it up with suffering, the suffering 
of women and children, till the outline is as 
pitted with these things as a map of London 
is pitted with names, and then you may have 
some idea, some faint idea, of the range of a 
heavy gun and the flight of a bullet." 

Surely there must be some deep cause and 
reason for all this suffering. It has not been 
sent by Providence; it has been brought about 
by man. The execution of the design is wholly 
carved out by humanity; it is self-torment, a 
kind of self-flagellation, that we are witness- 
ing, a determination of mankind to inflict the 
utmost evil on itself. Surely there must be 
some good reason? 

Or is it mania, a homicidal mania that has 
afflicted some portion of the human race, so 
that it runs amok amid its fellows and 



88 THE WAR AND AFTER 

endeavours to exterminate them before they can 
defend themselves? 

No sane man or set of men could imagine 
that the) 7 had attained to so great an elevation, 
so high and mighty a culture, that all the rest of 
mankind must either immediately rise to that 
status, or must recognize its superiority so 
vividly as instantly to succumb and grovel 
before it. Crazy megalomania is not unknown 
in asylums, and it has to be kept under restraint. 
The forms it takes are sometimes humorous, 
and onlookers have laughed at the antics of 
those whose sense of proportion, of decency, and 
of humour, have become totally obliterated. But 
when the monomania attacks a community of 
high organization and intelligence, with all the 
resources of civilization in its hands, designed 
and discovered by every country under heaven 
and constructed with the best brains and energy 
of the race, — then the spectacle becomes not 
humorous but tragic. 

Surely, even so, a glimmer of sense remains: 
they cannot anticipate conquest without a 
struggle, they must realize that not on prostrate 
inferiors alone will suffering be inflicted but 
on themselves also, that their own nation will 
suffer untold pain and grief whatever be the 
ultimate result. Will they not ask themselves, 
is the result — can any possible outcome — be 
worth the awful sacrifice which must be made 
in order to attain it? Either they never asked 
the question in this way, or they were so 
obsessed by their own superiority as to answer 
in the affirmative! None but madmen could 
give such an answer. Xo others could set 



"S.O.S." 89 

themselves against the whole human race, with 
the desire to exterminate it rather than fail to 
impose upon it their own ideas of progress and 
civilization and culture. 

"We look around upon the larger life of the 
social world and the political state — that mind- 
made structure into which the knowledge, the 
energy, the instructed will, of unnumbered 
generations of men have built themselves, the 
greatest by far of all the achievements of the 
human spirit: what do we see? It is welter- 
ing chaos thinly crusted over, and hardly held 
down; its elements ever embattling themselves 
for war. It is Civilization itself, the hard-won 
product of man's greatest pains, whose security 
seems to many to be at stake, striking its 
moving tent and facing a wilderness which no 
foot has ever trodden, and no man knowing 
what awaits it." 

Will it emerge at last? Or are its forces 
once more to be rolled backwards? 

It is certainly interesting that ancient methods 
of warfare have been to some extent resusci- 
tated, and that battles are again being fought 
on or near the plains of Troy, but it is hardly 
encouraging from the point of view of human 
progress. The inevitable question has been 
put — 

"Shall the epitaph on our human kind be 
nothing better than a forlorn 'As it was in the 
beginning, is now, and ever shall be'? What 
advantageth it any man that war is fought in the 
old way, in the ancient places, if war and the 
rumours of war shall never cease from our 
hearts?" 



90 THE WAR AND AFTER 

And the writer who asks this question, in a 
paper called The Arbitrator for May 191 5, con- 
tinues : — 

"There are times when hope grows faint, and 
human affairs seem to the tired eye and the 
aching brain a mere whirling revolution round 
one fixed desperate centre. Bound to the wheel, 
man turns full cycle in the course of the ages. 
'You know as well as we do/ said the Athenians 
of old to the people of Melos, 'that, as the 
world goes, the question of right is only dis- 
cussed between equals: while, among those who 
differ in power, the strong do what they can, the 
weak suffer what they must. 

"Our forefathers had high and generous 
aspirations one hundred years ago, when a 
quarter of a century's fighting had sobbed itself 
to sleep, and a Holy Alliance seemed to promise 
halcyon days to Europe. Their aspirations were 
not fulfilled. Within a few tens of years the 
winds of war were awake again, and rushed 
from their caverns, in sweeping gusts and heavy 
gales, to traverse a continent from end to end. 
Their fretting clamour arose, as it arises now, to 
the starry silence of the skies, and the white 
radiance of eternity was stained, as it is stained 
to-day, by the drifting smoke of the guns." 

Nor only of the guns. To their eternal shame 
they broke their plighted word here also, and 
are employing as instruments of torture the 
liquefied gases discovered by our own Faraday 
in Albemarle Street, during a century of what 
seemed like progress. 

Yet in one sense there is progress. We may 
be thankful that with us "there is a difference, 



"S.O.S." 91 

after all, between tHe tone and temper of this 
war and the tone and temper of the last war 
that England waged. Here, at least, there has 
not been recurrence. Into that war we rushed 
as if it were a joyous venture; into this we 
have gone as if it were — what, indeed, it is — 
a bitterly cruel necessity. We have not flaunted 
our flags or made merry over our enemies. We 
have possessed our souls in quietness. . . . 
If we can but capture these hours, and 
make them ours for ever — if we can but make 
the present temper of the nation our eternal 
possession — it may be that there remains a 
rest, after all, if not for us, at any rate for our 
children." 



CHAPTER XII 

MATERIAL EFFICIENCY AND 
SELF-INTEREST 

THE essence of Christianity is persuasion, 
and what Matthew Arnold called sweet 
reasonableness ; while Teutonic Kultur, 
on the other hand, deifies force and material 
efficiency. Short of this worship of mere expe- 
diency, however, and apart altogether from their 
regarding nothing human or divine as above 
the exigencies and expediency of the State, 
the German people have set an example to 
Europe in the systematic way they have culti- 
vated the practical arts and the applied sciences. 
They have not made a good use of the increased 
powers so conferred upon them, but they have 
made a very efficient use; and in that they 
have done wisely. They have shown that in 
their generation the children of this world are 
wiser than the children of light. For this they 
deserve praise, and have received it. Material 
efficiency is a good thing, German example in 
that direction was being extensively preached; 
and although not much practised yet in this 
country, and apparently hardly understood by 
our governing classes, yet the preachings in 
time would have had their due effect. The 

92 



MATERIAL EFFICIENCY 93 

danger is now that the wheat will be thrown 
away with the tares. 

We had much to learn from the German 
nation; we find that we had much to reject 
also; but material efficiency in the cultivation 
of science is not one of the things we have to 
reject. We have to free ourselves from what 
has now become conspicuous — the evil soul which 
has cankered and devastated all their progress — 
the lying and spying and brutality which have 
poured scorn upon their science as well as upon 
their politics and philosophy. 

In praising German efficiency I referred 
just now, incidentally, to the parable of the 
Unjust Steward, and the puzzling commendation 
bestowed upon his evil practices — not because 
they were evil, but because they were for his 
special object effective. Their evil character was 
the self-destructive part of them. 

So it is with German efficiency. For we 
must include under that head not only the appli- 
cations of science, the splendid organization, 
forethought, and strenuous industry shown in 
commerce, and in the arts both of war and 
peace; not only the legitimate discipline of the 
whole people for intelligent and economical pro- 
duction; but also the less admirable features, 
such as the self-seeking dealings with the Press, 
and lies promulgated in neutral countries, the 
elaborate spy system organized for years, — 
which also must have been developed by the 
same methodical kind of work that has obtained 
for them a recognized place in scientific 
and historical studies. We can fully admit that 
all material measures have been taken to the 



94 THE WAR AND AFTER 

uttermost, but the soul has been omitted. That 
is why their civilization bears such evil fruit — 
the fruit of brutality and atrocities which eclipse 
those of the Turk, in that they are carried out 
by order and with a terrorizing" object. 

So self-confident and self-sufficient have they 
become that they seek to impose their organiza- 
tion on all mankind. They have imposed on 
nobody; they have exposed themselves. They 
stand naked before an astonished Europe. 
With the telescope of the Lusitania they are 
visible even from America. 

As to their Kultur: — translation from one 
language to another has many traps. Vicaire 
means curate and cure means vicar. So Kultur 
does not mean culture but the opposite of 
culture; it is everything except culture, it is 
their idea of civilization, it consists chiefly in 
organization. There is nothing the matter with 
the organization, in itself it is good, but being 
devoid of soul it is insufficient: how fearfully 
insufficient we had not realized till now. 

Civilization without morality, with no wide 
outlook, no elevation of purpose, no loftiness 
of soul, no perception of beauty, no veneration 
or recognition of anything higher than the 
State, — it is blank atheism. Organization as an 
end in itself, devoid of religion and with all 
the culture of life ignored — it is like the old 
soulless political economy based on self-interest, 
with human nature omitted; — it is the old 
temptation of Genesis, "Ye shall be as gods"; 
and that of the wilderness, with all the king- 
doms of the world as the reward of devil-wor- 
ship. The fruit of the tree of knowledge, of 



MATERIAL EFFICIENCY 95 

knowledge only, is death and damnation. So it 
was in the beginning and so it is now. 

Nevertheless the English Nation might not 
have felt quite sure on this point. We had been 
taught so long about the merits of the German 
system of organization — we knew indeed that 
in certain ways it worked well — that we might 
have felt doubtful whether after all it was not 
permissible to try to accept it at their hands; 
whether in fact it was not nourishing sustenance 
or at least wholesome medicine that they were 
offering us, even though the spoon which they 
employed for the purpose was rather jagged, 
and though there was but little jam with the 
powder. 

Fortunately — if we can say fortunately — their 
conduct can have left no doubt on this point in 
the mind of a single reasonable person; for if 
that is the outcome of their system our own 
haphazard muddling along is infinitely prefer- 
able. To every one that is now clear — even to 
those who detest and despise the policy of 
muddle; but to people with special knowledge 
it seems to have been clear before. The young 
poet Rupert Brooke, who took part in the Ant- 
werp expedition and lost his life in the Dar- 
danelles — and who came of a peace-loving 
family — writing home in 191 1 about his gener- 
ally favourable experience of friendly German 
life in Munich, expresses himself thus concern- 
ing the deeper political nefariousness which he 
found underlying the pleasant superficial aspect 
of everyday existence. 

"I have sampled and sought out German 
culture. It has changed all my political views. 



96 THE WAR AND AFTER 

I am wildly in favour of nineteen new 
Dreadnoughts. German culture must never 
prevail !" 

Selfishness 

But it has been said that the policy of all 
nations is really controlled by selfish considera- 
tions, and that a claim for higher motives, like 
the assertion that we accepted the present 
challenge on behalf of smaller nations, is pious 
humbug. The kind of motive which drives 
Britain into war, it is said, was illustrated by 
our dealings with a small nation in South Africa, 
and by our abstaining from intervention on 
behalf of Bulgaria or Armenia or Macedonia. 
The determining cause seems to depend on 
whether or not we have anything to gain. 

Bernard Shaw, for instance, thus criticized 
our attitude to the present war. And in so 
doing he did not blame Britain — he did not 
blame either Britain or Germany. He con- 
sidered them both actuated simply by the only 
intelligible motive, namely self-interest. 

This used indeed to be the doctrine of the 
old Political Economy, that self-interest was 
the mainspring of life; but whatever be the 
case with the trained Capitalist it is not the main 
motive of the Nation at large. There is a 
healthier spirit in the Nation as a whole, much 
nearer to the Christian doctrine that the way to 
attain life is through willingness to lose it for 
a high ideal. It is amazing how on the score 
of self-interest anybody can be got to fight 
at all. There can be no self-interest in los- 
ing your life for the sake of your country. 



SELF-INTEREST 97 

Fighting on those lines is illogical — illogical but 
instinctive. 

Nevertheless if soldiers do shirk bayonets, or 
seek to save themselves unduly, or shelter them- 
selves behind women and children, it can be 
claimed that it is not cowardice, but a return 
to logic — a carrying out of the philosophy in 
which they have been instructed. That is the 
kind of way in which an evil doctrine defeats 
itself and contains the seeds of its own down- 
fall. That is why evil can never really dominate 
the world for long. 

The truth is that self-interest is very far from 
being the dominating motive of mankind. For 
one thing, there is always great uncertainty in 
which direction it really lies; and even if the 
well-known Christian paradox be set aside, there 
are many considerations which sway more 
strongly than strict logic. As "Bagshot" says: 
"Statesmanship would be easy and peace 
secure, if mankind were only governed by self- 
interest. It is the incalculable idealism of man 
— his passions and pride and lust for self-asser- 
tion and expansion — that destroys his peace and 
lends the glamour and the glory to his exist- 
ence. History teaches us to mistrust all 
policies which assume that nations will act as 
on a cold calculation of their material advan- 
tages they ought to act. There is always some- 
thing not ourselves which defeats the utilitarian 
within us." 

This is especially the case among those who 
have but little leisure or ability to organize 
their lives, and who live mainly by instinct. 



98 THE WAR AND AFTER 

The services given to society by such people 
are sometimes beyond praise. 

A great error has been committed, and wrong 
has been done, by historians sometimes speaking 
of our Army as a mercenary army, and all our 
soldiers as mercenaries: as if they were fight- 
ing for pay. The contrast intended is between 
a professional army and a National army. Our 
soldiers till lately have been professional, but 
they have never been mercenaries. 

Let it be understood that a mercenary soldier 
means the type of professional fighting man 
who in the Middle Ages wandered about Europe 
wherever fighting was going on, and offered his 
services for pay to any nation that was short of 
soldiers, without regard to the cause or object 
of the fight — treating himself in fact merely as 
a weapon to be wielded by whomsoever would. 

That our men bear constantly in mind the 
opposing ideals now in conflict, is not to be 
expected; but they know, clearly enough, that 
they are fighting for freedom from the yoke of 
an oppressor. They may well feel that subject 
to Prussian tyranny they would refuse to live. 
To put up with petty insults continually, to 
stand by helpless while those nearest to us were 
injured, would be intolerable. Far better to die. 
With that in the background of their thoughts, 
their main activities, their valour and splendid 
pertinacious courage, are instinctive. No volun- 
tary army could be formed in time of war if 
self-interest were the motive for enlistment. The 
British response to a call of duty and danger has 
been magnificent. 

And yet at one time a good deal was done 



SELF-INTEREST 99 

which might have killed the voluntary system. 
It is not the fear of death or torture that chokes 
off recruits, it is, or it was at one time, the im- 
personal inconsideration of officials. What the 
enemy can do to them men will suffer, but at 
unnecessary official maltreatment they rebel. 

When volunteers are asked for any forlorn 
hope at colliery explosions or shipwrecks they 
are always forthcoming; but the volunteers are 
not capriciously rejected on a variable standard 
of height, nor are they told to strip and wait an 
unconscionable time for a medical inspection, 
nor are they ruled as of no value because short 
of the tip of a little finger. These flea-bites 
are often more deterrent than real hardships. 
If it can be felt that the hardships are inevitable 
and part of the work, and are not due to mere 
official disrespect and carelessness, they are as 
gladly put up with as wounds. Death itself can 
be faced with very different feelings under different 
circumstances. We instinctively discriminate 
between what is inflicted by Providence and what 
is wreaked on us by man. The Titanic was re- 
garded very differently from the Lusitania. 

Mere wholesale death is not so great a 
calamity. The difference between a war and 
an earthquake, for instance, is very marked. 
An earthquake is a calamity to the body, but 
not necessarily to the soul. No feelings of 
wrath are aroused, only of misfortune. Whole 
families may be blotted out by an earthquake, 
and there need be no repining on the part of 
humanity. But the feelings induced by the 
purposeful infliction of death and torture are 
very different — much more deadly, much more 



100 THE WAR AND AFTER 

harmful. A most calamitous earthquake oc- 
curred during the present war, and it has 
been instructive to see the different feelings which 
it aroused. 

Nevertheless our foes expected us to be swayed 
solely by self-interest. We had acquired a repu- 
tation for selfishness and wealth-acquiring ease; 
but it was a false reputation and did not truly 
represent the people of England. Many a time 
the English people would have been willing to 
interfere with armed force when they saw 
flagrant wrong being done in Europe or Asia 
Minor, but their leaders hesitated and let the 
opportunity slip by. 

The accusation of selfishness is easy to make, 
and not easy to rebut; for in our past history 
we have not been free from it. Politicians 
often think they are doing the nation good 
service by keeping a keen eye on British 
Interests; and sometimes perhaps they are. 
But as with individuals so it is with a nation, 
its true Interest is not always in the direction 
of acquisition and greed. A nation has a 
soul too, and there are times when loss may be 
gain — certainly there are times when it may 
be wholesome, and when it would be willingly 
acquiesced in by the people. 

The action of Italy, whatever its immediate 
cause, is glorified by noble traditions in the 
past. The world does not forget Mazzini and 
Garibaldi and Cavour; they are a splendid heri- 
tage, and inspire confidence. Would that we 
had more of such traditions to our credit. Our 
actions now are handicapped by suspicion due to 
bad traditions in the past. It is not easy even 



SELF-INTEREST 101 

to make use of our fleet without arousing 
animosity, — especially on the part of people 
whose self-interest is endangered, and who 
imagine some commercial motive. Objection is 
raised to our stopping goods from Neutral 
Countries from entering hostile territory, and 
to our interfering with Neutral commerce by 
maintaining a kind of Blockade. But in such a 
matter we have no alternative: we must behave 
fairly and honourably not only to our own troops 
but to those of our Allies. They have the 
bulk of the fighting on land; the frontier which 
they are facing is immensely longer than our 
portion, and it is our Allies who will chiefly 
suffer by the incoming of extra hostile ammu- 
nition. It is our duty to protect them at sea, 
and keep war munitions out of Germany — 
including cotton and all other raw material for 
feeding either guns or fighters. There is no 
selfishness in that. There is damned selfishness 
in not doing it. 

Yet it is true here, as always, that bare 
selfishness does not really pay — that it is really 
safer to respond to the call of duty than to 
shirk it. That is why it is possible for a cynic 
to misconceive the motive. People are still to 
be found who think that England might have 
stood out, isolated by the sea, and defied the con- 
queror behind its navy; only taking care that it 
was always superior to that of any two or three 
other nations. But how long could this attitude 
of selfish isolation be maintained? 

Said Dr. Sarolea, two years before the war, — 
"With characteristic naivete and insular selfish- 
ness some jingoes imagine that if only the 



102 THE WAR AND AFTER 

naval armaments of Germany could be 
stopped, all danger to England would be 
averted. But surely the greatest danger to 
England is not the invasion of England: it 
is the invasion of France and Belgium. . . . 
In the past the battles of England have been 
mainly fought on the Continent, and so they 
will be in the future. A crushing defeat of 
France in the plains of Flanders or Cham- 
pagne, with the subsequent annexation of 
Northern Belgium and of Holland, would be a 
deadly blow to English supremacy." 

If we had been mad enough to hold our 
hand in the autumn of 1914, the deeds that have 
been done in Belgium would before very long have 
been done here also, and we should have had to 
bow our necks to the Prussian yoke. No one 
need deny that we are fighting for our national 
existence too. There are two kinds of war, 
and war for freedom is a holy war. 



CHAPTER XIII 

tVlh OR AGGRDSSIV3 WAR 

THE right translation of Kultur seems to 
be everything' in organized civilization 
except culture. For true culture the 
Prussian has no use — he despises and dislikes 
it: its opposite, which is aggressive war, he 
thinks noble and exhilarating; and what Mr. 
Wells calls "his gloomily megalomaniac his- 
torians" write of it as a large and glorious 
thing. In reality it is an outrage upon life, a 
smashing of homes, a mangling, a malignant 
mischief. 

The immediate object of war appears now 
to be, as Mr. Arnold Bennett expresses it, to 
tear flesh, to break bones, to suffocate, and to 
kill; the object of Prussian war is further to 
inflict such intolerable agony that it can no longer 
be endured,- — to overcome by any, even the most 
frightful, torture of body or of mind inflicted 
on combatants and non-combatants alike. The 
truth of this must be faced. And yet it would 
appear that the Prussians love and admire war. 
Why? Mr. Wells analyses their psychology in a 
plausible manner: — 

"These war-lovers are creatures of a simpler 
constitution. And they seem capable of an 

103 



104 THE WAR AND AFTER 

ampler hate. You will discover, if you talk 
to them skilfully, that they hold that war 
'ennobles/ and that when they say ennobles 
they mean that it is destructive to the ten 
thousand things in life that they do not 
enjoy or understand or tolerate — things that 
fill them therefore with envy and perplexity — 
such things as pleasure, beauty, delicacy, 
leisure. In the cant of modern talk you will 
find them call everything that is not crude 
and forcible in life 'degenerate.' And going 
back to the very earliest writings, in the 
most bloodthirsty outpourings of the Hebrew 
prophets for example, you will find that at 
the base of the warrior spirit is hate for more 
complicated, for more refined, for more 
beautiful and happier living. The military 
peoples of the world have almost always been 
harsh and rather stupid peoples, full of a 
virtuous indignation against all they did not 
understand. The modern Prussian goes to 
war to-day with as supreme a sense of moral 
superiority as the Arabs when they swept down 
upon Egypt and North Africa. The burning of 
the library of Alexandria remains for ever the 
symbol of the triumph of militarism over civili- 
zation/' 

"The State," glories Treitschke, "is no 
academy of arts; if it neglects its power in 
favour of the ideal strivings of mankind, it re- 
nounces its nature and goes to ruin. . . . the 
renunciation of its own power is for the State 
in the most real sense — the sin against the Holy 
Ghost." 

The easy belief of the dull and violent that 



EVIL OR AGGRESSIVE WAR 105 

war "braces" arises from a real instinct of self- 
preservation, a fear of the subtler tests of 
peace. The uncultured type of person will pre- 
serve war as long as he can. This type is to 
politics what the criminal type is to social 
order; it is resentful and hostile to every 
attempt to organize pacific order in the 
world. 

How then have we thought it right — and in 
the highest degree right — to enter on this war? 
Ah, there is the completest distinction between 
aggressive and defensive war: between war 
waged for the lust of domination and conquest, 
and war undertaken in defiance of a strong bully, 
and in defence of our own liberty and the exist- 
ence of weaker or friendly nations. 

As Mr. Roosevelt has said: — - 

"Any movement that fails emphatically to 
discriminate between the two kinds of peace 
and the two kinds of war is an evil not a good 
movement. Any movement that speaks against 
war in terms that would apply as much to such 
a war as that waged by Lincoln, as to a war 
waged to destroy a free people, is a thoroughly 
base and evil thing. 

"Above all, it is base and evil to clamour 
for peace in the abstract when silence is kept 
about the concrete and hideous wrongs done to 
humanity at this very moment. " 

The neutral attitude of America can be criti- 
cized,— but best by American citizens; and after 
all American influence is on the right side. 

"Germany knows that Americans condemn not 
only their manner of waging war but also her 
having brought the war about. Moreover, it is 



106 THE WAR AND AFTER 

well for us to remember what the American 
people have done. ... It is American help that 
has saved the Belgian people from starvation; 
and American ambassadors and consuls have 
done an incalculable service by their efforts to 
protect subjects of all the allied nations in Ger- 
many and in territory occupied by the German 
armies" (C. Pankhurst). 

And though there is a strong Peace party 
in America as elsewhere, the venerable Dr. Eliot, 
so long President of Harvard University, made 
the following solemn pronouncement to a meet- 
ing of Baptist ministers in Boston: — 

"Do not pray for peace now. I cannot 
conceive a worse catastrophe for the human 
race than peace in Europe now. If it were 
declared now, Germany would be in possession 
of Belgium, and German aggressive militarism 
would have triumphed. That would be a 
success for Germany after she had committed 
the greatest crime a nation can commit — 
namely, faithlessness to treaty rights, — the 
sanctity of contracts would pass for nothing, 
and civilization would be set back for cen- 
turies." 

Yet Germany is terribly strong, and its brutal 
policy of terrorism seems for a time to answer, 
by assisting the invasion of territory with a 
minimum of loss; and it does not scruple 
blasphemously to invoke the Deity on behalf of 
its abominations. Aye, it has long been known 
that during the period of success the wicked 
flourish like a green bay-tree; but wait for 
the test of adversity: at the breath of failure 



EVIL OR AGGRESSIVE WAR 107 

it is cut down, dried up, and withered. Hear 
Wordsworth : — 

"As long as guilty actions thrive, guilt is 
strong; it has a giddiness and transport of its 
own, a hardihood not without superstition, as 
if Providence were a party to its success. But 
disaster opens the eyes of conscience, and in 
the minds of men who have been employed in 
bad actions, defeat and a feeling of punishment 
are inseparable. 

"On the other hand, the power of an un- 
blemished heart and a brave spirit is shown, 
in the events of war, not only among unpractised 
citizens and peasants, but among troops in the 
most perfect discipline. . . . This paramount 
efficacy of moral causes ... is indisputable. 7 ' 

But it is possible for a moral sense to become 
perverted; and prophetic insight is shown in 
the following extracts from Dr. Sarolea in 
1912: — "To an Englishman war is a dwind- 
ling force, an anachronism. It may still 
sometimes be a necessity, a dura Lex, an ultima 
ratio, but it is always a monstrous calamity. In 
other words, to an Englishman war is evil, war 
is immoral. On the contrary, to the German 
war is essentially moral. Indeed, it is the 
source of the highest morality, of the most 
valuable virtues, and without war the human 
race would speedily degenerate. It is the main- 
spring of national progress. ... If war is 
a curse, then the wells of public opinion have 
been poisoned in Germany, perhaps for gene- 
rations to come. If war is a blessing, if the 
philosophy of war is indeed the gospel of the 
super-man, sooner or later the German people 



108 THE WAR AND AFTER 

are bound to put that gospel into practice. . . . 
The war of to-morrow, therefore, will not be 
like the war of 1870, a war confined to two 
belligerent forces: it will be a universal 
European war. Nor will it be a humane war, 
subject to the rules of international law, and 
to the decrees of the Hague Tribunal: it will 
be an inexorable war; or, to use the expression 
of von Bernhardi, it will be a 'war to the knife/ 
Nor will it be decided in a few weeks like the 
war of 1870: it will involve a long and difficult 
campaign, or rather a succession of campaigns; 
it will mean to either side political annihilation 
or supremacy." 

The madness of the present aggressive lust 
for power can only be likened to homicidal 
mania ending in suicide. 

Where Force is treated as right it is in- 
evitable that right and wrong — 

Should lose their names, and so should justice too. 

Then everything includes itself in power, 

Power into will, will into appetite; 

And appetite, a universal wolf, 

So doubly seconded with will and power, 

Must make perforce a universal prey, 

And last eat up himself. 

Troilus and Cressidd 



CHAPTER XIM 

SAVAGERY 

O shame to men ; devil with devil damn'd 

Firm concord holds, men only disagree 

Of creatures rational, though under hope 

Of heavenly grace, and God proclaiming peace, 

Yet live in hatred, enmity and strife 

Among themselves, and levy cruel wars, 

Wasting the earth, each other to destroy. 

As if, which might induce us to accord, 

Man had not hellish foes enow besides, 

That day and night for his destruction wait. 

Paradise Lost 

THE unprecedented outburst of savagery 
which has disgraced the present war is as 
unexpected as it is unwelcome. To the 
amazement of the rest of the world, Germany 
has rushed like a highway robber upon her 
unprepared neighbours, demanded enormous 
indemnities from them, and seized their goods. 
And, as a writer in Science Progress says, "The 
evil has been heightened by the innumerable 
tricks of the robber. She made treaties which 
she had no intention of keeping — treaties with 
other nations and conventions regarding the 
rules of war. She utilized her own citizens who 
were living in foreign countries to abuse the 

109 



110 THE WAR AND AFTER 

hospitality shown to them by spying on their 
hosts. . . . There is clear evidence that she had 
determined on the present outbreak long before 
it occurred, and that she used the murder of the 
Austrian Archduke merely as a plausible excuse. 
Like a bandit she prepared the secret dagger while 
she avowed friendship. It is a false statement 
that nations, like individuals, cannot be indicted 
for evil deeds, but the Germans have been so 
stupid as not to perceive the stigma which their 
actions have placed and will place upon their 
race for a century to come." 

While I write the German Chancellor is 
characteristically expressing indignant astonish- 
ment that Italy would not accept the word of 
Austria and Germany — the word of Germany! — 
but actually prefers to fight for its unredeemed 
provinces, as well as for the integrity of 
Belgium and Servia. 

Once more we must ask, for what are the 
Germans fighting? What is it that they expected 
to get? 

No war was necessary for extension of trade. 
"Everywhere Germans were welcomed in 
British territory, were allowed to trade under 
our flag, were shown the secrets of our indus- 
tries and even of our armaments, were allowed 
to acquire wealth, titles, and influence in Britain 
itself. For centuries we had remained the 
friends of our relatives the Germans. We had 
not opposed them in their ambitions. We raised 
no tariff barriers against them. We made no 
war upon their commerce, but gave to them and 
to all an open entry and an equal chance. There 



SAVAGERY 111 

was therefore no reason based upon racial ani- 
mosity or past disfavours to urge Germany to 
attack us." 

But even their ideas of trade appear to be 
warlike. Sir William Ramsey the chemist 
says : — 

"It has not been generally known that in 
commerce, as in war, the methods employed by 
Germany have been completely organized for 
many years. Instead of looking on commerce 
as an arrangement for mutual benefit, the Ger- 
man nation has regarded it as a war. And just 
as in the present war all methods of attack are 
regarded by the military advisers of Germany 
as legitimate, so we are slowly awaking to the 
knowledge that German commercial and in- 
dustrial methods have for years been ag- 
gressive." 

Those who started the war must have re- 
garded themselves as a virile race prepared to 
sweep away the effete dregs of a decayed past, 
yet in reality (to quote the writer in Science 
Progress again), the fight is between "nations 
which are for the most part equal in civilization 
and strength — belonging to very similar races, 
having nearly equal opportunities for agri- 
culture, manufactures, trades, arts and sciences, 
and for the most part obeying, or pretending to 
obey, the same great moral code. Under these 
circumstances, what could one of these nations 
expect to gain by flinging itself at the throat 
of others; what then would compensate for the 
dreadful tragedies which were sure to ensue; 
what praise of humanity could, under these 
circumstances, ever be bestowed upon the 



112 THE WAR AND AFTER 

victor; or what God would be ever likely to 
bless such a deed? Yet in a moment the tragedy 
has befallen us." 

They tell us that they made the war from fear 
i — fear of foreign attack — and that they in- 
fringed the neutrality of Belgium in a panic. That 
is a lie; but it is one that they should be held 
to. If it were true it w T ould be a comparatively 
intelligible, though a contemptible, excuse. A 
coward is always a danger to the community: 
one never knows when he will break out into 
senseless violence. It is well known in the 
west of America that a coward with a revolver 
is a serious danger. So also horses in a panic 
are liable to ruin themselves and every one 
near them. But to undertake all this 
slaughter for the purpose of spreading Ger- 
man or any other culture, — there is no expres- 
sion for that but raving lunacy. They uphold 
their sanity therefore by saying that they were 
panic-stricken. 

Though it is unlikely that they are personally 
any more cowardly than any one else, it is true 
that they have an official and authoritative kind 
of behaviour characterized by extraordinary and 
diabolically planned bullying, which is just as 
bad and proverbially has much the same result 
as cowardice. It is the fear of reprisals which 
causes them to commit atrocities; and when they 
enter a village they are willing to massacre the 
inhabitants rather than run the risk of a stray 
shot. For a time brutality seems efficient: in the 
long run it will prove disastrous. 

Moreover their lack of training in games and 
sports, and their exclusively military exercises, 



SAVAGERY US 

lead them to indulge in unfair practices which 
would be impossible to any people accustomed to 
fair play. 

Not only do they lack chivalry and a sense 
of humour, which is conspicuously absent from 
their nation at all times, but they lack the most 
elementary notions of honourable behaviour. 
Not all of them — not all those at sea, for in- 
stance; and of course only some of those on 
land. But certain unfair practices seem to be 
insisted on by authority; on the principle that 
all is fair in war, — which never has been in 
the least true. That proverb about all being 
fair in love and war emanates from the devil, 
and has had, and is having, vicious conse- 
quences; because, while it sounds plausible and 
semi-humorous, it lends itself to moments of 
temptation and undermines resistance. Any man, 
whatever his creed, must feel that foul and 
dishonourable deceit is beneath his dignity as 
a man, and that if he can only succeed by 
methods of that kind he would prefer to fail; 
since failure at any rate need not be 
dishonourable. 

In the German, absence of humour has 
become tragic. They are not wholly deficient 
in the quality; they are able to recognize the 
humorous side of people in the water trying to 
clamber up the slippery side of an up-turned boat. 
But it is not among their strongest qualities. 
Their indignation at the idea that one of their 
submarines might be attacked by a merchant 
vessel which it was intending to sink, is evi- 
dence of this. It was probably not in the Berlin 



114 THE WAR AND AFTER 

Zoological Gardens, but it might have been, that 
the following inscription was placed upon a 
cage : — 

This animal is vicious. 

When attacked it defends itself. 1 

So they issue a complaint to neutral Powers 
about the hostile attitude of merchant vessels 
when threatened by a submarine. So also they 
were profoundly moved to indignation by the 
attitude of Belgium, which behaved more like 
a porcupine than a sheep or a hare, and not 
only resented but actively opposed the encroach- 
ment of its territory by an armed force. What 
incredible impudence! 

The fact of unexpected opposition seems to 
arouse extraordinary feelings of animosity in 
high quarters in Germany — quarters which we 
must impersonate as the Kaiser, without pre- 
suming on any personal judgement. The best 
excuse that can be made for this indignant 
anger is one made by one of the characters, an 
old American dame, in Mrs. Sedgwick's novel 
Tante : — 

"But I guess we can't judge people like 
Mercedes, Karen. When you go through life like 
a mowing-machine and see everyone flatten out 
before you, you must get kind of exalted ideas 
about yourself. If anything happens that makes a 
hitch, or if anybody don't flatten out, why it 
must seem to you as if they were wrong in some 
way, doing you an injury." 

However superior in practice their conduct 

1 Cet animal est tres mediant 
Quand on Fattaque, il se defend. 



SAVAGERY 115 

Effects of Evii, Theory 

may be in the sense of being nearer to what 
they regard as their rightful will, the Prussian 
ideals as set forth by its leading politicians 
and professors are extraordinarily base. So 
wrong-headed and preposterous have their 
theories been that it has been difficult to take 
them seriously; we could not believe that any 
nation could act up to the mad doctrines and 
put in practice the crazy precepts of Nietzsche 
and his disciples, or regard them in any but a 
figurative and hyperbolic sense. The world 
has been inclined to laugh such vagaries to 
scorn, until the present outburst of intolerable 
evil has forced upon us the truth of the old 
theological dogma that perverted beliefs and 
false doctrines are the most deadly of all forms 
of evil, because most serious in their conse- 
quences, — leading in fact to nothing less than 
damnation. 

Conduct insufficiently restrained by sound 
faith, is lamentable enough but human. But for 
an evil faith to drag conduct down below the 
bestial level, and to drown the remonstrance of 
natural instincts in a flood of guile, — that is not 
human at all but devilish. 

We can hardly suppose that by a malign miracle 
the whole German nation has suddenly willed evil, 
but the practical outcome is like that. Theories 
become dangerous when they favour and justify 
the lowest impulses. 

"Some of their own militarist fanatics have 
said that they have no political aptitude; and 
they prove that now in their devotion to a 



116 THE WAR AND AFTER 

theory of self-preservation which is leaving 
them without a friend in the civilized world. 
War, they believe, is in all ages a return to 
barbarism; but how if the world has reached 
a stage at which it will not allow any nation to 
return to barbarism, at which the conscious 
barbarian is treated as the enemy of the human 
race? Then he has no chance unless he is 
stronger than the human race. And the 
Germans now have allowed their theory to ride 
them almost into that desperate pass. They 
have done what they hoped to do; they have 
frightened the world, and it laughs at them no 
longer.'' 

To say that war licenses acts of every kind is 
to make a quite irrational statement. For what 
is the object of waging war? Not surely to 
destroy the rest of humanity, but to do 
something useful either for the whole human 
race or at least for one's own nation. Hence 
war, like other things, had become civi- 
lized, and bounds were set to the permissible 
amount of destruction and devastation; of 
which, alas! a sufficiency must always be 
caused. 

What object can be gained by a return to 
savagery, — by letting loose mere passion with- 
out any intelligent control? Such a procedure 
must defeat its own ends, whatever they are. 
But to a reasonable being it can have no ends; 
it cannot possibly have any claim to culture, 
nor can it assist in spreading the ideas and man- 
ners of the conqueror; for if those are the outcome 
of its civilization it stands self -condemned. So 
that even if successful in overcoming resistance, 



SAVAGERY 117 

and making a cowed desert of the rest of the 
world, it would be beneath contempt as a mis- 
sionary effort. 

It is the same in war as in games. The object 
is not the mere winning. To win a game by- 
unfair practices, or by brutality, is not winning 
at all. The object of a football team, though 
apparently to place a ball between two posts, or 
over a certain bar, is not an object which 
justifies any and every method of achieving 
it. There would be no credit in taking the 
other side at some disadvantage, in handicapping 
them in some unfair way, or in trying to do 
it when they were not looking. Victory so 
achieved is worthless; and if, after all that has 
been done, the Germans now turned out ulti- 
mately victorious, their victory could be nothing 
but dust and ashes. 

Defeat is now their only hope, — they have left 
no other loophole; it is the only channel through 
which they can return to sanity,— and the sooner 
it comes now, the better for them and for every- 
body. 

A war carried on for no other object than 
the gratuitous infliction of suffering is destruc- 
tive to those who wage it, and the licence allowed 
or enforced on a soldiery must be subversive of all 
discipline and have dire consequences after a 
return to civil life. 

They err who count it glorious to subdue 

By conquest far and wide, to overrun 

Large countries, and in field great battles win, 

Great cities by assault ; what do these worthies, 

But rob, and spoil, burn, slaughter, and enslave 

Peaceful nations, neighbouring or remote. . . . 

Paradise Regained 



CHAPTER XV 

NON-RESISTANCE AND DEFENSIVE WAR 

GOOD people have been puzzled by the 
doctrine of non-resistance. There are 
certain cases in which non-resistance may 
be legitimate, a few in which it is admirable: 
there are other cases when it would be grossly 
immoral. There is no real practical difficulty 
in discriminating between these cases, though the 
difference is perhaps not easy to formulate. Our 
instincts or intuitions are often more to be 
trusted than our theories. 

Non-resistance may be legitimate enough 
about some personal injury, or about some weak 
yielding to temptation such as an understand- 
able theft; and the defaulter may be forgiven, 
— sometimes with happy results. It is the kind 
of thing that must be done every day in a 
large community, and it is done most readily 
by those who have themselves experienced the 
evil effects of harsh treatment. 

While in Canada I once heard that good man 
Prince Kropotkin, whom Russia of the past had 
imprisoned and expatriated for his opinions, 
catechized about his doctrine of non-resistance. 
"Do you mean to say that if a man stole your 
purse you would not have him put in prison?" 

118 



NON-RESISTANCE 119 

His reply was an impressive one — "No; no 
more would you if you had ever been in 
one." 

In cases where the punishment far exceeds 
the crime it is better to put up with an injury 
than commit a greater one. That is common- 
sense and simply human, and in accordance with 
our instincts if we have sufficient illumination to 
recognize it. In Mr. Galsworthy's powerful plays, 
The Silver Box, and Justice, those who put the 
law in motion over a trifle must have 
deeply regretted their precipitancy before the 
end. 

But all this natural restraint on conduct does 
not mean that we should refrain from defending 
the helpless, nor that we should fail to stand 
up for the right. A passive attitude of defiance, 
though itself far from impotent, is not suffi- 
cient; there must be an active and positive 
attack on certain evils as well. The cleansing 
of the Temple shows, if any demonstration were 
needed, that bold and violent activity in face 
of flagrant and disgraceful wrong can be essen- 
tially Christian. And if the foe has guns and 
machinery we must employ guns and machinery 
too. Actual physical conflict is not out of har- 
mony with the plan of creation; it represents 
a stage in evolution — not a very high stage, and 
one that the world must ultimately outgrow; — 
but much of the world is not yet completely 
beyond the tooth and claw period of animal 
existence. 

It may be a puzzle, but we must trust our 
higher intuition; we shall find absolute sup- 
port there for defensive fighting, though none 



120 THE WAR AND AFTER 

for selfish aggression; nor shall we find any 
justification for treachery or for insidious and 
lying statecraft, even though we encounter these 
evils rampant on the enemy's side — as we do. 

That verse of the National Anthem which we 
generally deprecate is truly appropriate just 
now: — 

Oh Lord our God arise, 
Scatter our enemies, 

And make them fall; 
Confound their politics, 
Frustrate their knavish tricks, 
On Thee our hopes we fix, 

God save us all. 

There is such a thing as righteous indignation. 

The following quotation is not from the Old 
Testament — an outburst of revolt against heathen 
persecution — it is in that most Christian 
and evangelical letter, The Epistle to the 
Romans. It might be printed in capitals as 
an inspired expression of deep and righteous 
indignation : — 

"Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their 
tongues they have used deceit; the poison of 
asps is under their lips: whose mouth is full of 
cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to 
shed blood; Destruction and misery are in their 
ways; and the way of peace have they not 
known: There is no fear of God before their 
eyes" (Romans m. 13). 

I would that all neutral nations, or at any rate 
so great and powerful a people as Americans, 
could have seen their way to express their feel- 
ings in similarly forcible language, when inter- 
national law and the dictates of common 



NON-RESISTANCE 121 

humanity were grossly violated, and could have 
taken honourable action accordingly. No fight- 
ing was necessary; the weapon of the boycott 
would have been amply sufficient as a sequel 
to denunciation; and they would have done their 
nation and the flag much honour. 

A non-fighting declaration of judicial hos- 
tility in the interests of civilization, and as 
representing the police of the world, could have 
been made. 

As an excuse for non-intervention it has been 
claimed that many of the citizens of the United 
States are German. That is only an answer if 
Americans are no longer to be considered as 
of our blood. In that case it is a foreign 
country, and no longer the America of our 
hopes. The federation of the English-speaking 
race, so long looked forward to — where is it!* 

But I doubt not that much will yet be done; 
the intervention needed from a non-European 
nation is so simple, so easily applied, so honour- 
able, and so effective. Apart from financial con- 
siderations, how the American citizen would 
rejoice to see the Stars and Stripes once more 
arrayed on the side of freedom and honour and 
in defence of truth and justice and right! 

Seldom indeed in any war is the issue so 
clear as in the present one. The tearing up of 
treaties, the contempt of the written word, the 
treachery, the lying, and above all the unspeak- 
able cruelties, put our enemy outside the pale of 
civilization, and he should be boycotted with 
firmness and decision. The sooner these evils are 

* The answer is given magnificently in 191 7. See Preface. 



122 THE WAR AND AFTER 

eradicated from the planet the better, and now is 
the time for attacking them in concentrated form. 

The policy of abstention, and apparently 
bland acceptance not only of breaches of inter- 
national law but of crimes against humanity, 
until some national affront is offered which 
cannot be ignored, will be felt hereafter a dis- 
grace. 

"He that is not with us is against us," is now 
being manifestly said by the supreme Power of 
Goodness, — that power which is being denied and 
blasphemously assailed. 

And how much might be done! 

"For, methinks, I see the great work indeed 
in hand against the abusers of the world, where- 
in it is no greater fault to have confidence in 
man's power, than it is too hastily to despair of 
God's work." 1 

But man's power, in such things, is also great, 
when exercised by a whole people for the right. 
As Wordsworth says, in a Sonnet of 1811 :— 

The power of armies is a visible thing, 
Formal, and circumscribed in time and space; 
But who the limits of that power shall trace 
Which a brave People into light can bring 
Or hide, at will, — for freedom combating, 
By just revenge inflamed? 

War as Suppuration 

War is not a healthy form of activity, it is 
a pathological symptom, a sign of disease; though 
truly it may be beneficent in the long run, as in- 

1 The elder Sidney, — treating of the war in the Nether- 
lands against Philip of Spain. 



NON-RESISTANCE 123 

flammation is beneficent. When things are wrong 
there must be a struggle to set them right, and the 
effort must involve pain and sacrifice. If the 
morbid microbes succumb permanently to the 
attack of our phagocytes, the result is renewed 
health. A deep-seated disease calls for desperate 
remedies, and inflammation may have healthy 
and curative consequences. The virulence of 
the inflammation is a sign of the severity of the 
disease. 

But we need a Lister to show us a better way 
than suppuration, an antiseptic or aseptic sur- 
gery, to deal with the wounds of the body politic. 
The most obvious evil in humanity at present 
is the Prussian spirit, its philosophy, its ideals, 
and its practice. These must be extirpated or 
humanity will succumb. But these are not the 
only evils, they are conspicuous, they are recog- 
nized, they are being attacked ; but there are others 
more deep-seated, barely suspected, less violent, 
but hardly less dangerous. While we are cleansing 
the Temple let us see to it that the work is done 
thoroughly. 

War is not always opposed to Christianity: 
there are worse evils than death. It is 
Christian to make a stand for the right, 
though never in a self-seeking spirit. If 
Germany had only disagreed with our methods 
and had tried doctrines of its own, had 
vigorously competed with us in commerce but 
had otherwise kept itself to itself, we should 
never have attacked it. If any Statesman had 
been wicked enough to attempt such a war, the 
working classes would not have allowed it. 
Their pronouncements for peace and brother- 



1M THE WAR AND AFTER 

hood were clear — clear enough on the passive 
side. But they did not go far enough; their 
willingness to supply actual help was doubtful. 
England has a reputation for inertia and selfish- 
ness; and it was this reputation for putting 
money-bags first, for regarding Turkish bonds 
more than the wrongs of Bulgaria and Armenia 
— whether the reputation was deserved or not — 
which misled people. Sir Edward Grey was 
not quite certain that the English people would 
go to war in defence of Belgium; he was 
careful to say that the Country must decide, 
but that he thought it would. A few Labour 
Members — good men in intention— are mistaken 
still, and adhere to their one-sided passive 
statement of peace and brotherhood and 
goodwill. 

But goodwill on the negative side is not enough ; 
there comes a time when activity is necessary, and 
when anything else is unchristian and inhuman. 
To maintain brotherhood effectively requires some- 
thing more than passivity: there is no brother- 
hood nor even neighbourliness in passing by on the 
other side. Active interference is required when 
an enemy tries to trample on a friend. At 
that stage we now are: and thank God we have 
responded ! 

To a nation exuberantly proud of its own 
organization and social structure, and anxious 
to force them on all the rest of the world and 
cram them down its throat by force, we say: — ■ 

Convert us by influence and teachings and 
reasonableness, if you can, and we will retaliate 
in kind; and in the course of the discussion 
we will remain brothers in argument, as we 



NON-RESISTANCE 125 

can be brothers in a football contest or any 
other fair game. But come to us with weapons, 
— aye, or go to our friends and Allies with 
weapons, to hack your way through and to 
impose your will on them — we will meet you 
with weapons also; and for the good of the 
world, and under the banner of Christ, we will 
resist you to the death. 

The present war has made this clear. It would 
have been better if it had been clear before; 
but nothing can really make things clear except 
acts. Deeds are the test of faith. By their 
fruits ye shall know them. By their fruits we 
can test the doctrine of the Politicians and Pro- 
fessors of Berlin. Neutrality in face of outrages 
like these would be a crime. To sit still and 
allow their doctrines to be forced on the whole 
civilized world would be false to our trust — • 
to ignore our mission, to deny our Master. It 
is in his name we are fighting, and we can plead 
his example. 



CHAPTER XVI 

CHRISTIANITY AND PACIFISM 

THOSE who emphasize as Christian the 
doctrine of non-resistance and the power 
of meekness and long-suffering, should 
remember that Christ came to show us those 
aspects of Deity which we might otherwise have 
missed. He did not emphasize the strong and 
fierce and dangerous aspects, except very inci- 
dentally and occasionally. He did not conceal 
them, but there was little need for calling atten- 
tion to those aspects, — Nature and History and 
common experience do that; the Hebrew 
Scriptures and Mosaic Law are sufficiently 
explicit; those attributes have always been 
familiar to all races of mankind. But the 
gentler aspects have not been so familiar, and 
those were what needed to be emphasized, — the 
aspects of Love and Friendliness and Com- 
passion — the otherwise almost incredible attri- 
butes of Sympathy and Fellow-feeling. Even 
the attributes associated with the term "child- 
like" cannot be alien from the fullness of the 
Godhead. 

Attending now to the Christian revelation, 
we must admit that there are many ingredients 
in the composition of human life with which 

126 



CHRISTIANITY AND PACIFISM 127 

Christ was not directly concerned; and war is 
one of them. For his lifetime happened in a 
period — one of the few periods — of world peace. 
Consequently we cannot say from direct evi- 
dence what his attitude to a righteous war 
would have been; that is, a war undertaken 
from no selfish motive, but in defence of right, 
of home, and of the weak. We know how- 
ever, unless we resolutely blind ourselves to 
facts, that his attitude would not have been one 
of inattention or non-resistance; we can judge 
fairly well from his parable of the wolf and 
the sheep-fold, — the good shepherd fought the 
wolf, while the hireling took refuge in igno- 
minious flight; we know it from his use of 
violence in the cleansing of the Temple, but we 
know it still more from his denunciations. He 
did not mince matters about the wrath to come. 
It must be remembered, — according to the 
view of orthodox Christianity, and in accord- 
ance doubtless with the views of those who 
claim in excessive detail supernatural sanction 
for the deeds and words of their Master, — that 
bodily violence in face of wrong was in his 
case unnecessary; denunciation was sufficient, 
since his denunciations, unlike ours, were effec- 
tive. Witness the case of the barren fig-tree. 
His Kingdom was not of this world, and there 
was no need for his servants to fight. Legions 
of angels were at his disposal; and the most 
scathing denunciation and summoning of woe 
was never wanting when wickedness was accom- 
panied by knowledge and when the wrongdoer 
erred in the face of light. There was not a 
trace of pacifist non-resistance on his part, 



128 THE WAR AND AFTER 

save in respect of personal injuries. He was 
not one to wash his hands and excuse himself 
from intervention when the innocent was un- 
justly accused, or when confronted with the 
powers of Satan. No, the typical pacifist was 
Pilate ! 

But, by Christ, the Devil and all his works 
were resisted to the death. In speaking of 
assaults on children he said: "Whosoever offend 
one of these little ones, it were better for him 
that a millstone be hung about his neck and that 
he be drowned in the depths of the sea" — meaning 
that any violent death was preferable to the fate 
that was actually in store for such a monster. So 
it was also that he denounced the orthodox re- 
ligious people of his time as religious hypocrites 
who were devouring widows' houses and for a 
pretence making long prayers, — "Ye serpents, ye 
generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damna- 
tion of hell !" With punishments and penalties like 
these at his command there was little need for 
bodily violence of any kind. "Fear not them," he 
said, "which can only kill the body and afterwards 
have no more power; but fear Him who can cast 
both body and soul into hell. Yea, I say unto you, 
fear Him !" There is no leniency, no pacific treat- 
ment of wrong here, nor is laxness anywhere to be 
found in the universe. Evil may be allowed to 
accumulate for a time, but sooner or later Nemesis 
arrives. 

It is the divine attributes of Deity that we 
have to learn, not their merely human aspect 
only; and some of those Attributes are fierce 
and inexorable. With all the powers of the 
Universe at His command He can stand by while 



CHRISTIANITY AND PACIFISM 129 

inhuman tortures are inflicted, and interfere no 
more than He did at the scourging and the 
crucifixion. 

Great pain can evidently be tolerated by One 
who sees both before and after, with far-reaching 
vision. Death and bodily pain are not the worst 
of evils; and slaughter — even wholesale slaughter 
— is from time to time permitted, if thereby evils 
can be eradicated from humanity which otherwise 
would remain dormant. 

Christ was not the only revelation of the 
attributes of .Deity vouchsafed to us. Surely 
people admit that the whole realm of Nature is 
another channel of intelligence; and we have 
our instincts also. We can learn by studying 
the mind of man as well as the starry heavens. 
The attributes we so learn are not the ones 
emphasized by Christ, — true, — the danger was 
that the human race should continue to attend 
to those other channels too exclusively; but it is 
folly now to take refuge in the other extreme. 

One fact that is vividly worth remembering 
at the present time is that God does not act 
without agents; it is only through suitable 
agents that the physical world is affected at 
all; it is probably through appropriate agents 
that Divine action is always taken. He acts in 
accordance with law and order; if evil is to be 
exterminated it is exterminated by means, and 
by appropriate and available means. When 
there was a revolt in heaven, orthodox people 
are given to understand that it was put down by 
suitable means, by contest and violence, in other 
words by war. It was not tolerated nor treated 
leniently. 



130 THE WAR AND AFTER 

Evil is not treated leniently in this universe. 
The punishment of sin is awful. Are not our 
sensitive nerves able to convey to us agonies of 
pain? Suffering is the badge of all our tribe. 
These things had been well rubbed into the 
Jewish nation: they are referred to as well- 
known, but the immediate era of Christ's presence 
on earth was "the acceptable year of the Lord." 
"The day of vengeance of our God" had not then 
come; but he never concealed the fact that come 
it would. 

And the execution of vengeance requires 
agents. If we are worthy, we may be employed 
for the purpose: if we are not worthy, doubtless 
other agents can be used. Not the sword only, 
but the noisome beast and the pestilence can 
be brought into service. But there are times 
when we can be honoured by being enrolled 
under a Divine Commission, and when the rooting 
out of evil is entrusted to us; and then, it is 
upon our character and conduct in the past that 
our efficacy and even our method will depend. 
If we are strong enough, and have clean hands 
and a record for strict justice, and have never 
over-reached or bullied a weaker neighbour or 
coveted or grabbed his goods, — then our bare 
word may suffice to prevent some great evil from 
befalling mankind, and may bring shame and 
repentance to the sinner. But if we are less 
worthy than that, then we too much be punished, 
even while we are relatively honoured, by being 
called upon to inflict and to suffer ills of 
various kinds — the inevitable result of national 
sin. 

When a nation behaves as the German nation 



CHRISTIANITY AND PACIFISM 131 

has behaved we are justified in sharing with 
the Highest a blaze of righteous anger, and 
we are summoned to the activities which accom- 
pany such anger. Wherever tyranny and vice 
are rampant, virtue means protest and strenuous 
activity. As the sword of the Lord, and in the 
power of His might, we must slay and extir- 
pate the evil men who are responsible for the 
outrages to humanity and who have dragged 
the nation down till they approve them. "Shall 
I not visit for these things? saith the Lord; 
shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation 
as this?'' 



CHAPTER XVII 



"l,OVE YOUR ^N^MI^S" 



NOT only the rulers have gone wrong, but 
the German people also. The people have 
shown themselves marvellously docile, their 
emotions being apparently under State control; 
and, when told to hate, they use every means 
to stimulate that feeling. One of their weak- 
nesses, all along, has been excessive mental 
sub-division, — trusting the specialist, sub-dividing 
the complexity of life until they have lost all 
comprehensive grasp; so the reins have now 
slipped from their fingers, and over everything 
of importance, even over their own passions, 
they have lost control. Even their Professors 
are State officials. The German Professor, as 
has been said, does not so much profess as 
officiate; and the whole class has shown itself 
amenable to political influence. A wonderful and 
horrible thing has been committed in the land: 
the Professors, teach falsely, Politicians bear rule 
by their means, and the people love to have it 
so. 

They are miserably deceived, but even so we 
have no hatred for them. The injunction to 
love our enemies is sometimes said to be im- 

132 



"LOVE YOUR ENEMIES'* 133 

possibly hard, but essentially and instinctively 
we are obeying it. No bitterness, but only 
honour, is felt for foes who do their duty 
strenuously and die or suffer heroically. How 
eagerly the nation has seized every opportunity 
of honouring sailors who in the course of their 
work have done us legitimate damage. There 
is a wholesome spirit in fighting a fierce and 
honourable foe who plays the game. We have 
shown in South Africa and in the Soudan that 
we can honour such foes, and feel no bitterness 
against them. How willingly we would do the 
same with the Germans if they gave us any 
opportunity, — as some few of them have, — has 
already been proved. They misunderstand it, 
they think it cowardice or hypocrisy, — some- 
thing which they can better understand. But 
we know that it is nothing of the kind; in 
serious matters like that we are not hypocrites, 
and our practice really comes up to, and often 
exceeds, our profession. 

In Mr. Begbie's interesting account of all 
the multifarious activity he saw behind the 
English lines in France, he narrates the follow- 
ing:— 

"The other day a doctor fell in with a British 
soldier whose blood was maddened by what 
he had seen of German treatment of our 
wounded men. 'Do you know what I mean 
to do/ he demanded, 'when I come across one 
of their wounded? I mean to put my boot in 
his ugly face.' The doctor replied: 'No, you 
won't; it's not in your nature. I'll tell you 
what you will do — you'll give him a drink out 
of your water-bottle.' To which the soldier, after 



134 THE WAR AND AFTER 

a pause in which he searched the doctor's face, 
made grumbling and regretful answer: 'Well, 
maybe I shall' " 

And when we think of the ministers of 
mercy, the doctors and nurses who brave danger 
and witness horrors to succour the wounded, 
who accompany the engines of destruction for 
the illogical but beautiful reason of lessening as 
quickly as possible the injuries they do, — 

"Is it not as if behind a tidal wave of flame 
risen from the very core of hell's furnaces there 
followed a squadron of the heavenly host, whose 
faces shine with the beauty of the grace of 
God?" 

It cannot truly be said that the British have 
been unchivalrous. To refrain from protesting 
too much good intention is wise, for it is hard 
to raise conduct to an ideal level; and failure 
to achieve what we aim at, looks like hypocrisy. 
There are few vices to which as a nation we 
are less prone. The Germans are not hypo- 
crites either, but then they strenuously and 
loudly profess evil. It cannot be always easy 
to act up fully even to their profession, though 
some of them have made far too successful 
efforts. 

The injunction translated "Love your enemies/' 
if pressed unduly and beyond its reasonable mean- 
ing, may sound like an impossible and futile 
counsel; it would have been more readily under- 
stood if it had been worded — Honour and respect 
your foe, be ready to recognize good in him and 
to meet him half way. In all this our nation has 
a clean record. 

But the translation is right. To love people 



"LOVE YOUR ENEMIES" 135 

as ourselves does not mean to be uncritical towards 
them, or to refrain from blaming or punishing 
them. Far from it: the best human nature has 
always been severe on its own failings and frailties 
and sins. But it does mean trying to understand, 
to see their point of view, to rejoice at any spark 
of good and of honourable conduct which may 
be detected. In so far as there are none such — • 
approbation and affection would be utterly 
misplaced. 

But think of the barbarous futility of an 
opposite injunction, and of the extraordinary 
state of mind which can lead people to regard 
the injunction "Hate your enemies" as a national 
or human asset ! 1 

The good faith and trustfulness of the 
German people have been imposed upon, and 
they have been so misinformed and misled 
about this war, and about the diplomacy which 
led to it, that they have made themselves 
willing tools; but never in a spirit of conscious 
wrong. 

A German whose eyes have been opened, 
writing for his own people, has explained 
to them the wickedness of the diplomacy of 
both Germany and Austria, in a book called 
J' Accuse published in German at Lau- 
sanne; but the circulation of the book in 
Germany has been forbidden. From its 
1 The absence of reciprocation on our side is illustrated by 
the following: — 

At smoking concerts near the front I am told that German 
prisoners sometimes contribute musical items to the pro- 
gramme, and that occasionally the chairman's call takes this 
form : "Mr. Franz Schmidt will now oblige with the Song 
of 'ate." 



136 THE WAR AND AFTER 

Germany will surely be forbidden. From its 
epilogue I translate but a brief sentence or 
two: — 

"The confidence of the German nation has 
been shamefully abused by its leaders and rulers; 
round its eyes, once so clear-sighted, the dark 
band of ignorance has been tied. Out of peace- 
loving citizens have been made fighters filled with 
hate and vengeance; out of representatives of high 
culture and intelligence, blind and narrow de- 
votees. . . . 

"They have ruined and blinded the German 
nation in order that they might be able to 
hound it into a war which it had never fore- 
seen, never intended, and never wished. To 
make it 'free/ they have brought it into 
slavery. ... A faithful son of Germania, I 
see the deluded mother stumbling to the preci- 
pice, and spring forward to save her from the 
fatal fall. Is it still permitted in the Germany 
of to-day to speak the truth? Or have things 
already gone so far that lies only are 
fitting? . . . 

"Hundreds of thousands can be guarded from 
death, the German nation from ruin, — now, but 
now only — , if truth can make its way into the 
hearts of the German people. For truth is a 
call to halt, while lies are a step forward on the 
road to ruin. 

"The truth will but serve our adversaries, — 
do you think? You great children, closing your 
eyes to escape danger! Your adversaries have 
long known it. . . . But you, Germany, in- 
corrigibly trustful dreamer, you alone are still 
slumbering, — -are still sleeping peacefully, in 



"LOVE YOUR ENEMIES" 187 

all your unrighteousness, the sleep of the 
righteous. " 

Yes, the cause still seems righteous in the 
eyes of the people, and still they are willing 
nobly to sacrifice everything for its attainment; 
that is why we can still respect them. 

"We have seen our enemies dying fine deaths 
bravely for a cause which, to our thinking, is 
neither brave nor fine; and when they have died 
like that, for a cause like that, we give them all 
that we can, and all that we may — the respect 
brave men deserve. We have hated a cause; we 
have not hated, and we pray that we may never 
hate, the combatants.' ' 

Yet the present is no era for untimely 
generosity. Those who advocate treating the 
enemy well, and giving him good terms, should 
be sure first that we have the upper hand, — 
should be sure indeed that the enemy realizes 
and admits that fact — otherwise it will seem only 
like weakness. A farmer catching a culprit in 
his apple orchard may, if he chooses, refrain from 
thrashing the boy he has caught, and even give 
him a few apples and tell him not to come again. 
But if, instead of a boy, he encounters a man 
with a bludgeon, — a friendly and charitable treat- 
ment of the violent culprit may be otherwise 
interpreted; and the pacifist farmer might soon 
find that his orchard had to be abandoned alto- 
gether. Indeed that would be the ultimate result 
of non-resistance, pressed to extremes, in face of a 
truculent foe; there would be nothing for it but 
to get off the earth. 

There have doubtless been saintly individuals, 
here and there, whose personal and divine 



\ 



IBS THE WAR AND AFTER 

dominance was such as to disarm even a 
truculent foe. If you have a personality such 
as that, developed during a lifetime of saint- 
hood, nothing further need be said; no instruc- 
tion is required by such a one; his behaviour 
would be part of his character, and his influence 
may be extraordinary. But for ordinary un- 
trained and ungifted persons to attempt con- 
duct on this level because they admire it, when 
the whole foundation on which it is built is 
non-existent, is certainly unwise and cannot but 
lead to disaster. The apostolic injunction "Let 
this mind be in you which was also in Christ 
Jesus" is sane and right and strong; and 
if that is the state of your mind you are above 
exhortation or rebuke. But if it be not the 
state of your mind, if you have not led the 
life which makes that possible, if you are only 
pretending that your mind is in that condition, 
— then the pretence will become apparent, and 
your actions will discredit yourself and disable 
your friends: besides doing mortal injury to the 
cause you have at heart. There are good people 
about to-day whose desire for good is genuine 
enough, though their power and wisdom are ter- 
ribly limited. So far as lies in their power 
they are, without intending it, encouraging the 
foe. 

It is the same in industrial war — to which 
some of those who now advocate premature and 
easy conditions of peace may be more accustomed. 
While your enemy is undefeated, an offer of 
easy terms is a sign of weakness. Ordinary 
commercial bargaining would obviously be jeop- 
ardized by premature offer of easy terms. Only 



"LOVE YOUR ENEMIES" 139 

when you are really master, and the foe 
(whether it be workmen in a strike or masters 
in a lock-out) is defeated, can leniency and 
generosity be proposed without their being not 
only misunderstood but actually detrimental. 
All such talk at the present time is a danger 
to the Commonwealth, especially if its impor- 
tance — as is all too likely — be overrated by the 
foe. 

But what a period it is through which we 
are passing, one of the scourging and purify- 
ing epochs of the world's history! The good 
feeling and the generosity are only untimely: 
presently when peace reigns once more, they will 
resume their value, and be an asset to mankind. 
Tribulation is always grievous, and the pain suf- 
fered by kindly and tender souls must be severe; 
but it is the method necessary for threshing out 
the grain, and we are now buying the 
threshing-floor that in the future may stay the 
plague. 

Saddened and serious the nation will hence- 
forth be, sobered by the loss of so many bright 
young lives, — brilliant, some of them, with every 
worldly prospect, heirs of great estates, in- 
heritors of great names, to human ken lost and 
gone — 

Oh Iago, the pity of it; the pity of it, Iago! 

And those who return, saved as by fire, what 
scenes they will have witnessed, what memories 
will cling round them, what horrors have they 
not been through? For a generation at least 
frivolity will surely be burned out of the land, 
a consuming fire will have passed over it; 



140 THE WAR AND AFTER 

and an outpouring of the Spirit, long expected, 
will meet with keener receptivity than ever be- 
fore. 

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead ! 
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old 
But dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold, 

Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, 
And paid his subjects with a royal wage; 
And nobleness walks in our ways again; 
And we have come into our heritage. 

We have reaped the fruits of the past, we 
are struggling through the present; only those 
now young will enter upon the future — a future 
clouded with anxiety but brightened with hope. 

"To you, young men, it has been given by a 
tragic fate to see with your eyes and hear with 
your ears what war really is. Old men made 
it, but you must wage it — with what courage, 
with what generosity, with what sacrifice of 
what hopes, they best know who best know 
you. If you return from this ordeal, remember 
what it has been. Do not listen to the shouts 
of victory, do not snuff the incense of applause; 
but keep your inner vision fixed on the facts 
you have faced. You have seen battleships, bay- 
onets, and guns, and you know them for that they 
are, forms of evil thought. Think other thoughts, 
love other loves, youth of England and of the 
world! You have been through hell and purga- 
tory. Climb now the rocky stair that leads to the 
sacred mount." 



PART III: THE FUTURE 

"Thy kingdom come'' 



When history records its final verdict upon this great war 
and decides upon its real causes, it will be influenced not so 
much by what we are saying now, as by what we do after- 
wards. 

Much remains 
To conquer still, peace hath her victories 
No less renown'd than wan . . . 



PART III: THE FUTURE 
CHAPTER XVIII 

TH3 OUTCOME 

THE toil and suffering are not over yet, the 
need for continued exertion is patent; it 
is too soon to estimate the consequences, 
but the pain and danger have been so severe 
that surely the nation will take warning, surely 
it will not let itself sink back into old habits, 
and once more become sluggish and luxurious. 
Not England only but Europe should be renewed 
in the spirit of its mind. The earth might be 
so fine a habitation for an ennobled human race; 
the physical beauty of its early summer — which 
to some percipient souls is so intense as to be 
hardly bearable — is only typical of what might 
be throughout, if man also became harmonious. 
If, in some strange indirect way, the present strife 
contributed towards an effective realization of this 
truth, the outcome would be worth even the 
cost. 

But it must be admitted that the result of the 
war must be dependent on the progress our 
civilization has made during the era of peace. 
We cannot suddenly change our character; 
what we can do is to use the opportunity to 
develop and foster those wholesome attributes 

143 



144 THE WAR AND AFTER 

which might otherwise have lain dormant — to 
display the power and the goodwill which only a 
strong stimulus can bring into the light of day. 
Humanity rises under stress, it responds to a 
strenuous call, and the same individuals who 
have gone on working and grumbling and living 
ordinarily most of their lives are found to be- 
have as heroes when danger is imminent or 
when the call of duty comes. War is by no 
means the only real stimulus: opportunities for 
heroism arise in times of peace also; and, whether 
at a coalpit, or a fire, or a shipwreck, men are 
able, without self-consciousness or any heroics, 
to perform prodigies of valour and willingly to 
risk their lives. Daily routine is often too dull 
to bring out the best in human nature; only 
the really strong soul can live heroically amid 
the ordinary humdrum affairs of life. That 
seems to be a test beyond ordinary human 
nature; yet the heroism is there all the time, 
often unsuspected, — it only needs circumstances 
to call it out. T. H. Green used to say that 
"one of the chief trials of life was its slow- 
ness.^ What modern courage is called on to 
face is not, as in war, the storm and the whirl- 
wind with their grandeur and romance, but what 
William James called "the steady drizzle" of 
small inconveniences, discomforts, annoyances, 
depressions, and despondencies. Even in modern 
warfare itself, in the case of the vast majority 
of those who are either directly or indirectly 
engaged, it is doubtful whether it is not this 
virtue, under exceptionally exciting conditions, 
that is mainly called for. 

The merit of Nietzsche's message — and it has 



THE OUTCOME 145 

many; merits when interpreted intelligently — is 
that he urged his unpromising nation to treat 
daily affairs as opportunity for heroic effort. 
This is the meaning of the sometimes misin- 
terpreted passage quoted in its context before, in 
Chapter VI :— 

"Live dangerously. Build your cities on 
Vesuvius. Launch your ships on uncharted 
seas. Live at war with your equals and with 
yourselves !" 

So also G. B. S. set forth dramatically, in 
Major Barbara, a proposition which it is not 
unfair to consider as responsibly intended: — ■ 

"Nothing is ever done in this world until 
men are prepared to kill one another if it is not 
done." 

And again, in the same play: — 

"When you vote, you only change the names 
of the Cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down 
Governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old 
orders and set up new." 

Well, we have been "shooting" now. Surely 
we may hope that we may have had circum- 
stances enough, or shall have had by the time 
the war is finished, to call out our faculties, 
not momentarily but permanently, and to estab- 
lish ordinary life on a higher level than before. 
That is a special feature in the training of the 
Boy Scout, that he is to seek opportunities of 
kindly service in the daily round; — so it must 
be part of the education of the ordinary citizen 
to recognize an opportunity for service in the 
life of honourable industry, in the life of 
creation rather than in the life of destruction, 



146 THE WAR AND AFTER 

in the arts of peace rather than in the arts of 
war. 

"There is truer duty to be done in raising 
harvests than in burning them, more in build- 
ing houses than in shelling them, more duty in 
honest and unselfish living than in honest and 
unselfish dying. To be heroic in danger is 
little. To be heroic in change and sway of 
fortune is little. To be patient in the great 
chasm and pause of loss is little. But to be 
heroic in happiness; to bear yourself gravely and 
righteously in the dazzling of the sunshine of 
morning; not to forget the God in whom you 
trust when He gives you most; not to fail those 
who trust you when they seem to need you least — 
this is the difficult fortitude. ... All the duties 
of her children to England may be summed up 
in two words — industry and honour" (Ruskin, 
The Crown of Wild Olive). 

But we must keep our leaders up to the 
mark: we must make them use all their abili- 
ties for the good of the Nation; we must call 
them away from the game of Party Politics, 
from a consideration of party gains and per- 
sonal careers; or rather we must show them 
that their careers will be ruined by persistence 
in any such trivialties. We have been counted 
among the champions of Christendom; we have 
stood up for Christ against Belial. The cause 
of the Nation is now the cause of Christ, 
Politics is no longer a game, but a serious 
matter. We have been face to face with the 
powers of evil; the powers of good have been 
on our side. We must be faithful to the highest 
that we know; the Nation must raise the 



THE OUTCOME 147 

standard of the greatest Revelation in human 
history. While as to the Christian Churches,— 
they must admit their essential unity, they must 
try to regard their differences as they would 
be regarded from a higher standpoint; 
religious denominations must cease from squab- 
bling, on pain of losing their hold on the Com- 
munity. The cry of the religious teacher, in 
essence if not in words, must be "Back to 
Christ." 

We shall have learnt that death and sacrifice 
for the good of humanity is not too high a 
demand, even on the most ordinary of the sons 
of men; while as to the higher, the mountain 
peaks of the race, — the atmosphere is tremulous 
with the wave of sympathy which is passing 
through it, and death is but the prelude to im- 
mortal victory. 

Unto each man his handiwork, unto each his crown, 

The just fate gives; 
Whoso takes the world's life on him and his own lays down, 

He, dying so, lives. 

Whoso bears the whole heaviness of the wrong'd world's 
weight , 

And puts it by, 
It is well with him suffering, though he face man's fate ; 

How should he die ? 

Seeing death has no part in him any more, no power 

Upon his head ; 
He has bought his eternity with a little hour, 

And is not dead. 

For an hour if ye look for him, he is no more found, 

For one hour's space ; 
Then ye lift up your eyes to him and behold him crowned, 

A deathless face. 



148 THE WAR AND AFTER 

On the mountains of memory, by the world's well-springs, 

In all men's eyes, 
Where the light of the life of him is on all past things, 

Death only dies. 



CHAPTER XIX 

ON THE DULNESS OF WAR, AND ITS CIVILIAN ASPECT, 
AND ON EFFECTIVE NEUTRALITY 

THE demonstration of the uninteresting and 
monotonous character of modern civilized 
warfare is a feature of special value. War 
is now a dull and dirty business, and the acces- 
sories of its organization are much more closely 
related to the discipline associated with convict 
labour than ever before. 

The state and panoply of war is a thing of 
the past. Parade finery has become an ana- 
chronism. It used to have a meaning when 
people actually went into war in fine clothes; 
but now that they are all discarded before 
business begins, they have become a sham and 
a pretence, like bad architecture, which pretends 
to be stone whereas it is really iron, the sham 
arch being supported by a girder. Real fighting 
clothes are not conspicuous but workmanlike. 
Armies do not advance with banners flying and 
trumpets blowing, but in loose open order, each 
individual looking after himself, and taking shelter 
or digging himself into the mud as soon as pos- 
sible. Tools are therefore quite as important as 
arms; and miners with safety breathing ap- 
pliances may prove themselves the fittest to sur- 
vive. 

149 



150 THE WAR AND AFTER 

It is much the same in marine warfare. To 
conduct sneaking undersea attacks on fishing 
boats or trading vessels is no occupation for 
a gentleman; and the deteriorating effect of 
this kind of work on German sailors has be- 
come conspicuous. It is dishonouring to a noble 
profession. 

Every war has its own lessons, and training 
based on past experience gets rapidly out of 
date. Initiation and originality are more neces- 
sary than mechanical obedience. Changes are 
very rapid, and excessive practical instruction in 
extinct methods may be positively harmful. 

Moreover war has become to a great extent 
a matter of civil organization: traffic and supplies 
and railways, engineering and scientific appli- 
cations and medical resources; all which things 
can be studied and encouraged and developed 
in times of peace, only a slight dislocation and 
extension being needed to make them available 
in times of war. In medicine and surgery this 
seems fully recognized. It might be more 
recognized in engineering and many other 
subjects. 

Far less than before is war an exclusive and 
self-contained subject. A few leaders and officers 
who make it a profession there must always be; 
but the bulk of the combatants should be en- 
gaged in civil occupations, and a moderate amount 
of parade drill should be sufficient. Open order 
advance must depend a good deal on individual 
prowess, and training for it must be more akin 
to scout work than to parade drill. Older methods 
have to be partially unlearned in modern war; 



DULNESS OF WAR 151 

it is full of emergency, and occasional breaches of 
regulation-tightness may be justified by success. 

The system of keeping soldiers nearly idle 
during peace, and too superior to do civil work 
efficiently, must be out of date. Trench work 
is dirty and muddy, and there is no reason why 
the men should not engage in similar work 
in peace time. In the old days at the South 
Kensington Museum, if a bucket was wanted, 
two men and a corporal were sent to fetch it; 
the two men brought the bucket between them, 
the corporal marching with them. This sort of 
thing is nonsense, and is akin to the "goose step" 
— a characteristic though ridiculous Prussian at- 
titude. 

It is right that war should disturb industrial 
organization, and that warriors should freely 
utilize the skill of civilians, who willingly help 
if called in and given the opportunity: it is not 
right that a whole class of the community be 
kept for war purposes alone. War is only 
tolerable if made a dire national necessity, so 
that it will never be entered upon lightly or for 
the sake of a career; it ought to interrupt 
careers, and be only undertaken when it is forced 
upon us from outside, — as in the present 
instance. 

We have learnt that against certain foes peace- 
ful civilians enjoy no immunity in case of in- 
vasion. Hence they must be able to resist. For 
that purpose, and that purpose only, they must 
all be armed and trained, — -at least wherever in- 
vasion is a possibility. 

But apart from the actual danger which 
civilians now run, of overbearing and atrocious 



152 THE WAR AND AFTER 

insult, universal body-training for service should 
be the rule; not what is now known as 
military training — or not much of that; — but 
plenty of something more like naval training — 
the training of the handy man; training for use- 
fulness of all sorts, analogous to that of Boy 
Scouts; together with exercise for maintaining 
bodily fitness, for power of marching and 
carrying weights and endurance generally. Such 
discipline would be good for the nation, 
and would lessen the number of street 
loafers and corner-men, whose very aspect is a 
disgrace, 

To call upon every nation to maintain so large 
a body of troops as to be able to intervene 
effectively by armed force in case of need is 
too much, but there ought to be an international 
police to enforce the judgements of international 
law. Law without force at its back is futile. 
There must be penalties for crime, and they 
must be enforced. The armies of the future must 
be maintained not for national aggrandizement, 
but as an international police. And the more 
civic and industrial the normal occupations of 
the force can be, the better. Many humane duties 
can be found for them, — even for the few who 
have to be specifically professional, — just as' 
they are found for the ordinary civic police of 
to-day. 

The army should be more like a police; 
and the more international the purely military 
calls upon it can be made, the better; — 
an international police for enforcing inter- 
national law, like the civil machinery we 
have for defence against burglars: the police 



CIVILIAN ASPECT OF WAR 15S 

being armed whenever burglars are armed, and 
provided with all the proper machinery. In 
mechanism and equipment nothing should be 
lacking; and every industrial organization should 
be pressed into the service. But it should be in 
full swing for ordinary industrial purposes at 
other times; and the managing and directing 
powers of those who have acquired long expert- 
ness by practice should be utilized in times of 
war. War should perturb the ordinary processes 
of trade; it should be conducted by their means 
and at their expense. Business should not go on 
as usual. 

All neutral nations should consider it their 
duty to uphold international law, and must cease 
to consider themselves free to refrain from 
action in face of international crime. But only 
in face of actual crime should the international 
force be mobilized. The right of revolt and 
insurrection must be preserved. An army used 
to suppress freedom would be a curse. Like 
every weapon, many inventions, and nearly 
every scientific discovery, military force can 
be misused: its employment should be jealously 
guarded and limited to its proper purpose. It 
must certainly be no engine in the hands of 
any one class, nor of any one Government. It 
must not be used to suppress popular criticism 
and free speech. All this is or should be plati- 
tude: for if there is a danger in this direction 
we are better without the force. The right use 
of force is to sustain, not to repress, freedom, 
and to uphold the principles of international 
law. 



154 THE WAR AND AFTER 

Neutrality 

International law, people say, is confused 
and uncertain; but unless neutral nations do 
their duty in suppressing international crime, it 
is likewise impotent. Irrespective of any deli- 
cate question of law, there have recently been 
manifest crimes committed against humanity. 
These demand punishment. If neutral nations 
take no notice, the offender glories in his im- 
munity and continues his diabolical practices. 
It is troublesome no doubt to pronounce a 
strong judgement, the lazy way is to sup- 
pose that there may be something to be 
said on both sides, and to steer a middle, 
neutral, smug, and passive course. In case 
of crime against the innocent, this pro- 
cedure is utterly unfair. It is stigmatized 
forcibly by Browning in The Ring and the 
Book. The balanced judgement of the lawyer — 
it was not then the Pope — in that poem is blas- 
phemy against truth and right. The fatal out- 
come of such inertia could be no worse if 
judgement were viciously and purposely given in 
favour of wrong. 

It may be said truly by some neutral nations 
that they are not called upon to fight. That 
may be so, but in that case they are so for- 
tunately situated that without sacrifice of blood 
and treasure, merely by supplying help in one 
direction and withholding it in another — sacri- 
ficing nothing but an evil opportunity for profit 
— they can while declining war take effective sides. 
There should not be a civilized state in the world 
now that countenances such acts as have been 



NEUTRALITY 155 

ordered by the ruthless policy of Germany. The 
powerful criminal should be banned and isolated 
by all the rest of humanity. 

Apart altogether from armed intervention, 
or from any participation in current disputes, 
the weapon of the boycott can be made very 
effective against a criminal nation; and any ill- 
treatment of prisoners or helpless people left 
in the enemy's hands should be most severely 
dealt with. For this cold-blooded and dis- 
graceful sin there is no excuse, and there should 
be no forgiveness: it is an outrage on 
humanity. 

Of how great service America has been to 
us in this one respect — that of obtaining access 
to and reporting concerning our prisoners — it 
is unnecessary to speak. It is an honourable 
service which as a matter of course it performs, 
but nevertheless we are grateful; and the effort 
not altogether to lose the approbation of that 
great people has been a restraining influence on 
exalted criminals who have very nearly cast off all 
restraint. 

The cutting off of supplies and diverting the 
stream of commerce from a delinquent, is a 
kind of war, and a very effective kind, but it 
is war which does not seek to maim and shatter. 
It cannot be undertaken without pecuniary and 
commercial sacrifice, entry upon it is therefore 
highly honourable, and its sole object is to 
bring erring nations to their senses, to 
strengthen the principle of right and equity, 
and to uphold a righteous government of the 
world. 



CHAPTER XX 

SOCIAL UNREST 
j'accuse 

ONLY in a country like Germany which has 
concentrated its soul on war-preparation can 
a war be really efficiently conducted. The 
fact that modern war had become a scientific and 
industrial undertaking is there well understood; 
and, partly in consequence of that perception, the 
industrial and scientific resources of that country 
have been developed to the utmost, and so organ- 
ized that they can be diverted from peace to war 
purposes without delay or dislocation. The 
familiar inscription on railway trucks (6 horses 
or 40 men) and the personal bearing of railway 
officials, are outward and visible signs of this easy 
transition. 

On the other hand it is manifest that we 
are almost hopelessly far from such a concen- 
tration — even in time of dire need. War Office 
officials, without adequate training in mercantile 
affairs, continue to manage what should be 
managed by competent civilians; and though 
they now conduct certain things, such as trans- 
port, in an admirable manner, under the orga- 
nizing genius at their head, other things are 
being seriously mismanaged. Scandals are arising 

156 



SOCIAL UNREST 157 

about contracts; and even many months after the 
war broke out competent and specially trained 
civilians anxious to help were not trusted and 
not encouraged. Meetings take place for organiz- 
ing manufacturing firms on a war basis, but 
hardly anything is done. All this may, I hope, 
become ancient history at any moment: but, even 
so, valuable time has elapsed before it is set 
right. 

We have depended almost wholly on the 
strong and resolute character of the men at 
the front, and we have dawdled over the 
preparations which would back up their bravery 
and make it effective. 

Consider the civilian's position, and his 
irritating impotence in the face of what he 
knows is dire need. Great manufacturing firms 
are given rights and privileges for the good 
of the community; and when the call comes upon 
them for special service, they could surely re- 
spond, not merely to definite red tape orders, 
but in an organizing capacity; and they would 
be able to manage their business far better 
than when hampered by well-meaning but 
ignorant officialdom. Neither business nor 
finance can be efficiently worked by amateurs, 
any more than an inexperienced civilian can 
conduct a campaign. Civil activities must 
bend to military need, but the civil organiza- 
tion itself should be utilized, fully informed, 
and trusted. 

Treachery would be rare, and when discovered 
should be dealt with in prompt military man- 
ner. The vicious contractor is as dangerous as 
a full-blown traitor. He may exist but surely 



158 THE WAR AND AFTER 

he is exceptional. Patriotism might easily be 
made the dominant note. Greed is a temptation 
which inefficient control only strengthens. 
Venality is not wholly excluded, or some officials 
are much slandered. Secret commissions are 
spoken of in some countries, and there are 
scandalous rumours even about the supply of 
arms. 

But hideous evils like these need no denun- 
ciation. They skulk in darkness: the light of 
day would destroy them. There are people com- 
petent to drag them out; and random accusations 
are worse than useless. Let us deal here only 
with those evils which are not universally felt 
to be evils, — with those remediable errors which 
are consistent with a feeling of righteousness 
and honour and duty. Mistaken or ill-informed 
officialism is one: it has been obstructive in every 
war we have had, and it is only less obstructive 
now. Hitherto the patriotism of manufacturing 
firms has prevented active revolt, but the tradi- 
tional methods of the War Office, in subjects 
which they do not understand, have been 
irritating beyond words. Let us hope that under 
the present regime the tradition will be 
broken. 

Then the workmen must be better instructed 
about what is expected of them. Posters invite 
them to enlist, but other information should be 
given, and their services should be asked for in 
many other ways also. To have Trade Unions 
deciding on limitation of output, and artificially 
restricting the working of machinery because 
of some conditions to which they had grown 
half -accustomed in time of peace— an outcome 



SOCIAL UNREST 159 

of social strife and misunderstanding between 
employer and employed — to have such con- 
ditions extending into war time, so that men at 
the front are being slaughtered for want of the 
munitions which would do half the work for them 
— is utterly intolerable. It is treachery of the 
worst description. It cannot be meant as such: 
it must be due to defective imagination, the result 
of lack of education. Authoritative exposition and 
instruction is the remedy ; the poster method might 
be still more employed for the dissemination of 
trustworthy information. 

When the indignation of a people breaks out 
into rioting, the way to calm them is not by 
police suppression, but by information. If they 
are assured that the authorities are actually deal- 
ing with certain abuses, they will not go to the 
trouble and danger of violence; but if they are 
not so assured, they may feel it their righteous 
duty to show to those in authority that the 
country is in earnest, and that the population is 
behind them if they take strong measures. In 
a Democracy this is no small matter to be 
assured of. People in a higher class write to 
the Times, or speak on platforms, when they 
feel similarly moved; but for the mass of people, 
to whom a brick is handier than a pen, what 
outlet for their feelings have they, beyond a 
protest emphasized by physical force? In 
its origin the outbreak may be quite serious and 
conscientious; but of course the danger is that 
a rough and irresponsible element, always lurk- 
ing in the community, may utilize the 
opportunity for frolic, and may bring dis- 



160 THE WAR AND AFTER 

credit on the movement by random destruction and 
looting. 

Adequate and prompt information would stop 
the beginnings of disturbance, provided the 
Government were able to say and to prove — 
what unfortunately they are often not able 
to show — that they are fully awake to the position 
and are taking prompt and effective measures. It 
is just because this is not only not known, but 
sometimes not the fact, that rioting is in a man- 
ner justified, and occasionally does assist to stimu- 
late into activity those who might otherwise be 
asleep. 

The populace cannot be expected always to 
respond to stimulus just when desired, and to 
refrain from all undesired forms of activity, un- 
less it is more frequently taken into confidence 
and informed clearly and sufficiently what is being 
done. 

There are indeed some measures taken by 
the enemy to which we in this country would 
hardly stoop. It is part of their efficiency not 
only to develop their own industries but to try 
to injure ours by a system of spies and of 
agents provocateurs. Bribes of more or less 
indirect kind can be given to employers, and 
the natural tendency of hard-worked and 
ignorant men to drink and idleness and slack- 
ness can readily be fostered by aliens in our 
midst; free drinks can be provided at a cost 
not excessive considering the advantage of 
obstructing the production of munitions of war; 
and our unsuspecting workers may fall into the 
trap. It is a loathsome and dirty kind of war, 
but that to some minds seems to be an attrac- 



SOCIAL UNREST 161 

tion. And in so far as they are really en- 
deavouring to make war loathsome and filthy 
as well as horrible, — and in so far as they incite 
us to retaliatory measures altogether beneath 
our dignity, thereby lowering the moral cur- 
rency below that of savages, who do at least 
make war with open force — so far they may be 
stimulating an ultimately beneficent reaction, 
since the whole atmosphere of so-called war will 
become too disgusting for civilized nations any 
longer to be able to endure it. 

What is past is past — though not beyond in- 
quiry and punishment, — and we are looking to 
the future. In the future we want to get down 
to the root causes of an evil state of things. 
Something is very wrong with industrial condi- 
tions when workmen's organizations can delib- 
erately withhold munitions and threaten strikes, 
not because of any immediate grievance, but to 
uphold certain rules and regulations which in past 
time they have made. 

But although the call for special and sustained 
effort is loud, there is no excuse for harassed 
employers or impatient officials to urge men to 
continuity of labour, for long periods together, 
beyond their strength. Such over-pressure de- 
feats its own end, it makes for inefficiency; length 
of hours does not mean greater output. Skilled 
and thoughtful attention is necessary to all these 
points, and to the physical and mental health 
of workpeople. Spurts of extra work are pos- 
sible, but they must be short ; and if men are over- 
strained, their stamina or their nerves break 
down, so that when an extra call comes they 
cannot respond, and in sheer hopeless reaction 



162 THE WAR AND AFTER 

may give way to the temptation of careless 
oblivion. 

Overwork on the part of men and animals is 
to be deprecated, — periods of rest are essen- 
tial, — but intermittent operation is no benefit 
to a machine; — that is quite different from 
animate exertion — a machine is not overworked 
by continuity of service, rather the contrary. 
A watch is none the better for being allowed 
to run down. 

Mechanism should work continuously, includ- 
ing time for cleaning and repairs; and the act 
of artificially keeping a machine idle at the 
present time, when it might be making munitions, 
is wickedness and treachery. 

In war an autocracy or dictatorship has a 
great advantage over a system of popular 
government, unless the populace is wise enough 
and well-informed enough to suspend its ordi- 
nary methods of restriction and revolt. The 
throes of war is no time to speak of social reform. 
In so far as that is attempted now, we are reap- 
ing the fruits of a bad past; the gleaners are 
storing trouble for themselves and are hamper- 
ing their cause in the future. They have a 
good cause, if only they would not be foolish 
now. Can they not suspend their rules and throw 
all their energies into the work, be the conse- 
quences what they may, when their brothers are 
being sacrificed by the thousand for want of 
their aid? They are honoured in finding that 
their help is so urgently needed, and that they 
are competent to give it. To abstain is folly 
which can only be half-excused by ignorance 



SOCIAL UNREST 163 

or stupidity, and verges perilously near to 
crime. 

Most working-men feel this strongly, and are 
moved to indignation at the slur cast upon their 
class by the action or inaction of what can only 
be an obstinate few. It is the minority only 
whom we accuse: but the others are so busy 
they have not time to put the case strongly 
enough themselves. It is in their behalf that we 
must speak. 

And in speaking we must recognize, in all 
fairness, the magnificent mass of labour and 
energy that is being thrown into the national 
work, not only now but always. The "working 
class" is an epithet of nobility, a title to dis- 
tinction. It is to that class, always active on 
sea and land, that the nation owes its comfort, 
its luxury, its sustenance, and its safety. Among 
the workers must be reckoned those who in 
normal times have a reasonable amount of 
leisure — as all should have — even though their 
work is not strictly hand work. And of what 
are ordinarily called the more leisured classes, 
many, as is well known, are at the front, sacri- 
ficing themselves with distinguished honour at 
the call of duty, and surpassing themselves in 
acts of heroism; while many others are work- 
ing hard and doing all they can in various ways 
— ambulance and other. On the whole all classes, 
without distinction, have responded nobly, in ac- 
cordance with the demand of their traditions and 
privileges. 

But there is a residuum of all classes — most 
disgraceful among the well-to-do — who respond 
not at all to the national need, who regard the 



164. THE WAR AND AFTER 

whole position with selfish detachment, who 
block the railway line with their special trains, 
and who frankly think the war a bore because 
it interferes with their comfort and their sports. 
These are not worth appealing to: they are 
useless excrescences on society anyhow; if they 
abstained from gambling they would be doing 
no good. Their possible usefulness is not worth 
considering. Let them alone; they are already 
damned. 

But with the industrial classes the case is far 
otherwise, and it behoves us to ask very care- 
fully how is it that any reasonably patriotic 
British working-men do not feel the call of 
patriotism more intensely? Those who join 
army or navy in time of war undoubtedly do 
feel the call; but those who stay and work are 
just as necessary, and ought to feel that they can 
just as really and honourably serve their coun- 
try by work into which they put their utmost 
energies — not counting the cost, not seeking for 
extra profit or better conditions, and not allow- 
ing any kind of class feeling to rise to the sur- 
face, until the foe has been vanquished and peace 
restored. 

Hear Mr. Ruskin on the roots of honour; he 
is worth a hearing: though he is then chiefly 
addressing employers. He is explaining that 
we honour a soldier because he is ready to die 
for his country; and that every profession is 
honoured because of the sacrifice for which, under 
given circumstances, it successfully calls. He 
specifies the conditions under which a man will 
undergo suffering and loss — the due occasion on 



SOCIAL UNREST 165 

which he should be ready to die — rather than prove 1 
false to the trust reposed in him : — 

"The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle. 
The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague. 
The Pastor, rather than teach Falsehood. 
The Lawyer rather than countenance Injustice. 
The Merchant — what is his due occasion of 
death?" 

May we not say — rather than not provide for 
his country the materials it grievously needs? 

Shall Commerce and Trade be the only dis- 
honourable profession? Nay, rather we shall find 
that "commerce is an occupation which gentle- 
men will every day see more need to engage in, 
rather than in the businesses of talking to men, 
or slaying them; that, in true commerce, as in 
true preaching, or true fighting, it is necessary 
to admit the idea of occasional voluntary loss; 
— that sixpences have to be lost, as well as lives, 
under a sense of duty; that the market may have 
its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit; and trade 
its heroisms, as well as war." 

This has begun to penetrate to some employers 
of labour — it must penetrate to many more. It 
has hardly begun to penetrate to the workmen. 
Till it does, their occupation lacks the dignity which 
is essentially its due. 

Let us now leave railing accusations, and con- 
sider calmly what are the roots of the evil, if 
haply we may discover the source of them, and 
thus find a way to a remedy. 



CHAPTER XXI 

INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 



N considering the changes that should be 



I made after the war, it is essential to remem 
ber the ghastly conditions of life and death 
which we have idly acquiesced in; hoping 
with a kind of grim hope that they were inevit- 
able, and that so not we were responsible but 
only the nature of things. The abominable 
false doctrine that humanity would always mul- 
tiply to the limits of subsistence has been 
responsible for much supineness and hopeless- 
ness in social reform. That doctrine has proved 
itself conspicuously untrue; and surely the war 
has taught us that Society may be more effi- 
ciently organized, so as to attack a multitude 
of remediable evils. Enthusiasts hope that 
humanity can see its way to put down war for 
ever. That is probably beyond our power; 
we cannot legislate for all eternity. But there 
are more important things which do lie within 
our power, and which are really more important 
than mere cessation of fighting. There are 
reforms at home waiting to be accomplished; 
and there are men able and willing to deal with 
them, if only the sinews for that wholesome kind 
of warfare were provided. — The expenditure not 
of a tithe, nor yet of a hundredth, but of a 

166 



INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 167 

thousandth part of the cost of this war could in 
a few years lead to an extraordinary benefit to 
Society and might constitute a literal renewal 
of life. 

Needless infant mortality is responsible for 
as many frustrated lives as war. This one sen- 
tence touches a topic of vital moment! And 
survival is often mere existence — certainly not 
fulness of life. Life is just what we do not 
sufficiently attend to. Mr. Bernard Shaw is 
constantly preaching the value of life and the 
strength of the life- force, if we gave it a chance 
by removing manifest and fatal disabilities, and 
if we helped it with energy and enthusiasm 
such as we are ready to bestow without 
hesitation upon war. This is what he has re- 
cently said:— 

"Mr. Sidney Webb offers to put an end to 
British unemployment and destitution, with their 
infinite loss and demoralization, for a paltry 
couple of million pounds. Sir Horace Plunkett 
offers to quadruple the produce of the Irish soil, 
and thereby avert the land and labour war that 
is hanging over Ireland, at a cost of £5,000 a 
year for technical education in agriculture. 
They might as well ask for the sun and stars. 
No mother sends her son to live for England. 
No father shakes his son's hand and says 'I 
wish I were young enough to stand beside you 
in the fight for a decent country to live in.' '' 

Now that we have learnt the power of or- 
ganization, and the vast importance of scien- 
tific education to civilized man, we surely can- 
not be content to continue the old discredited 
methods of government by officials and 



168 THE WAR AND AFTER 

amateurs, and stint all really enlightened enter- 
prises by the prosaic and debilitating handicap 
of scarcity of funds. The impecuniosity of 
practically all genuinely educational and scien- 
tific institutions is a national disgrace as well as 
folly. 

As the President of the Leland Stanford Uni- 
versity in America has lately said : — 

"We spend now some $290,000,000 a year 
on 'preparedness for war/ of course without 
getting it, though coming once or twice dan- 
gerously near it. Let us in addition spend 
one per cent, of this amount on prepared- 
ness for peace. It is an experiment worth 
trying." 

The value of human existence, as it might 
be developed if we rose to the height of our 
opportunities, is well expressed by Mr. Lowes 
Dickinson : — 

"There can be no peace, not even a genuine 
desire for peace, until men realize that the 
greatness of a people is to be measured by the 
quality of life of the individual citizens. A 
city like Athens or Florence is worth all the 
Empires that have ever been. The nobility of 
a people lies not in its capacity for war, but in 
its capacity for peace. It is, indeed, only 
because the nations are incapable of the one that 
they plunge so readily into the other. The task 
of peace is to create life, as the task of war is to 
destroy it; to organize labour so that it shall 
not incapacitate men for leisure; to establish 
justice as a foundation for personality; to un- 
fold in men the capacity for noble joy and pro- 
found sorrow; to liberate them for the passion 



INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 169 

of love, the perception of beauty, the contempla- 
tion of truth." 

And again, speaking of humanity generally, 
"If men had given to the creation of life a 
tithe of the devotion they have offered again 
and again to its destruction, they would have 
made of this world so glorious a place that 
they would not need to take refuge from it in 
the shambles. It is our false ideals that make 
for war. And it is the feebleness of our in- 
telligence and the pettiness of our passions that 
permit such ideals to master us. We seek col- 
lective power because we are incapable of in- 
dividual greatness. We seek extension of 
territory because we cannot utilize the territory 
we have. We seek to be many, because none 
of us is able to be properly one." 

But though a democracy is often afflicted 
with a spirit of unwise and disproportionate 
economy, neither idealism nor ambition can be 
reckoned among its weaknesses. It can be drilled 
for war, but the difficulty of organizing it 
for the arts of peace is partly due to its 
not understanding the worthiness of the ob- 
ject — having naturally small perception of the 
beauty of life, — and partly to its disinclina- 
tion to submit to authority even of its 
own choosing, preferring to be swayed rather 
by the passion of the moment than by wise and 
considered judgement. Yet "when a man 
chooses for himself the part that he will take in 
the national organization, the more incumbent 
on him is it to fulfil that part to the utmost; 
where he has a voice in the selection of those 
who represent supreme authority, it is all the 



170 THE WAR AND AFTER 

more incumbent on him to obey loyally." That 
is where our enemy has an advantage. For 
in a military autocracy, the danger of anarchic 
individualism is far less real; the people are 
readier, as it were by instinct, to do what 
they are told, and are not accustomed to think 
for themselves. "But Liberty has its price, 
Jike all else that is worth the having; an4 
that price is greater risk to the State and greater 
responsibility to the individual/' 

That truth is just why the attitude of some 
of the intelligent artisans in this country is 
specially perturbing and disappointing; the 
supine and apparently selfish attitude of some 
of them is deserving of scrutiny. To what 
is it due? The facile slander is to attribute it 
to drink; and drink is not without its influ- 
ence. Alcohol is perhaps supplied freely by 
interested enemies, and the temptation may 
often be succumbed to. But the attitude of 
some good workers to the country's needs is 
susceptible of deeper explanation than that. It 
is not, and it cannot be, lack of patriotism; the 
very same sort of men volunteer for deadly 
service at the front. Whenever they can feel 
that they are serving the Nation and not the 
Capitalist they are heroic; the blighting sus- 
picion which curbs their effort is as to who 
reaps the benefit of all their labour. And 
this is not a momentary impulse or trivial ques- 
tion: it has grown up during all the centuries 
of factory labour and dividend-earning Com- 
panies. Labour is a floating commodity, easily 
accessible, and enterprises are started on the 
certainty that the necessary labour can be got 



INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 171 

for the asking, and can be discarded and changed 
at will. The real grievance of labour is the 
absence of interest in work — the long hours of 
monotonous soulless toil. 

The words of Coleridge, in The Friend, ex- 
press for us this part of the social problem: 
"Those institutions of society which should 
condemn me to the necessity of twelve hours' 
daily toil, would make my soul a slave, and 
sink the rational being in the mere animal. It 
is a mockery of our fellow-creatures' wrongs 
to call them equal in rights, when, by the bitter 
compulsion of their wants, we make them in- 
ferior to us in all that can soften the heart or 
dignify the understanding." 

And a writer in a recent Hibbert Journal 
(April 191 5) says: — 

"In any great industrial city one looks at the 
people, at their dwindled, indefinite types, their 
deadening work, their play, which for the most 
part they perform by proxy; and, after humbly 
acknowledging certain virtues in them which 
such a life would certainly kill in oneself, one 
is still tempted to cry, 'But nothing, nothing, 
can ever make this a vital, creative, and there- 
fore whole and happy race again !' ' 

That is a hard saying, but the conditions 
must be held responsible for whatever industrial 
apathy there is. 

"I am not unpatriotic," said a workman 
when remonstrated with. "I had two sons at 
the front, one of them is killed. I am willing 
to serve the Country; but I will not slave over- 
time, and seven days a week, to increase the 
profits of a blasted blood-sucking board of 



m THE WAR AND AFTER 

Directors. I will work the hours I choose (he 
might go on) and for as long as is necessary 
to get me the pay I need for a week. More 
I don't need, and I want to live a human life 
and not the life of a slave. Show me work that 
has any interest and excitement and a spice of 
danger, and I'm on; but to tend a machine 
day after day from my youth up, — I'm about 
sick of it; and if they want it done for fifteen 
hours a day they can get another machine to 
do it — not me." 

How can the modern craftsman have joy in 
his work, — work without thought or originality 
or initiative, or anything but a long familiar 
mechanical skill? It can be tolerated for a few 
hours a day, since that is the way in which he 
draws from the capitalist a living wage, but 
as for the work itself the workman sometimes 
feels that it may go to hell and the capitalist 
with it. 

"What's all the work for?" he sometimes 
asks. "I don't know who wants the things. 
They're not produced because they're wanted, 
but because there's a profit on each; and if a 
million are turned out in a year, then the profit 
is a large one. I'm one of the hands that makes 
the profit for some one, and I'm tired of it. 

"Slums tempered by beershops, that's where 
we live, and we're taken on and shoved off just 
as may suit the manager. If the country needs 
my services, let it take them direct, let me 
have something to live for, something to work 
for, let me realize what I'm doing and be 
allowed to put some thought into it. Then I'll 
put my back into it too." 



INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 1*73 

An anonymous writer in The New Statesman 
describes the average workman's position thus: 
we may not approve or relish the description, 
but we may at least bethink ourselves how far, 
allowing for some exaggeration, it is true: — 

"Consider the working-man's position. He 
has no security in his work beyond the week — 
frequently not beyond the day. He lives 
at the whim of the employing classes. He lives 
as it were at a week's notice. He sees his 
children growing up about him, and he knows 
that an accident may happen to him, any day, 
as the result of which they will be left to the 
harsh charity of the parish. He sees them 
growing up with the gutter for their only 
garden, and he speculates on the future of 
all that brightness and laughter, and its in- 
secure tenure even of the gutter. He sees 
them doomed to live almost for certain in the 
same flowerless monotony in which he himself 
has always lived. When they come into the 
house, he is like a man fighting for air. They 
are all fighting for air. They are overcrowded; 
they cannot get away from each other; they 
get on each other's nerves. Hence the occa- 
sional furies of mean streets, the outbreaks of 
violence and drunkenness. He attempts to bring 
some of the beauty of the world into his home: 
he has a caged bird, a cat, a pot of geraniums. 
He has one or two meanly showy glass orna- 
ments on the mantelpiece; but his house is 
almost always ugly. He is dumped, as it were, 
into a brickfield: he has no inheritance in the 
teeming earth. Wherever he goes it is the same. 
He is herded into cheap galleries in the theatres: 



174 THE WAR AND AFTER 

he is pushed into separate bars in the public- 
houses. He is a person cut off, put in his place. 
He is an outsider, and his children are out- 
siders, in a world of motor-cars and rich 
dresses and gardens. . . . And yet, paradoxi- 
cally enough, he is cheerful rather than 
bitter, and he faces death for his coun- 
try in great battles with music-hall jokes on 
his lips." 

Yes, they are fine at the front, where their 
importance is obvious; nor are those of the 
more privileged class any less fine, there. But 
at home we have got into a rut of bad condi- 
tions, and so into an apparent lack of patriotism, 
for which the blame may have to be evenly 
distributed. The writer quoted above sees 
faults in employers, and objects to the workmen 
being regarded as "the bad boys of the family, 
whom it is always safe to blame. Whenever 
any dispute arises between them and their 
employers, they are almost invariably regarded 
as the aggressors. The employer who insists 
that war shall be the occasion of lower real 
wages and larger profits, is looked on as a 
sensible business man. The worker who 
demands that during war-time his children's 
stomachs shall be filled at least as usual, is 
browbeaten as a fellow who is disturbing the 
national unity and interfering with the supply 
of necessary things to his brothers in the 
trenches. The employer who strikes against 
giving his men an honest wage is never painted 
in half so dark colours. And yet it is his 
refusal to pay a fair wage which has again and 



INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 175 

again in recent months held up the work of the 



war." 



The evil, whatever it is — the root of the so- 
called conflict between Capital and Labour— is 
not that of one nation, but of civilized humanity. 
What then is the remedy? 

One remedy is militarism. Let the worker 
be dragooned and disciplined into habitual 
obedience till he becomes docile, asks no ques- 
tions, and does not cultivate a soul; then he 
will be useful to the State. And the Capitalist 
class — let them be disciplined and docile too. 
The State will then be supreme; and provided 
other nations live a slacker kind of existence, 
it will acquire a world-dominance and be able 
to impose its will upon them all ; — that is the 
ideal condition from the German point of view. 
What an ideal! 

"It may, however, be said — in view of our 
present industrial conditions, and the low 
standard of physical health and vitality pre- 
vailing among the young folk of our large 
towns — that physical drill and scout training, 
including ambulance and other work and quali- 
fication in some useful trade, might very well be 
made a part of our general educational system, 
for rich and poor alike, say between the ages 
of sixteen and eighteen. Such a training 
would to each individual boy be immensely 
valuable, and by providing some rudimen- 
tary understanding of military affairs and 
the duties of public service and citizenship 
would enable him to choose how he could be 
helpful to the nation, — provided always he were 
not forced to make his choice in a direction 



176 THE WAR AND AFTER 

distasteful or repugnant to him. In any good 
cause, as in a war of defence against a foreign 
enemy, it is obvious enough that there would 
then be plenty of native enthusiasm forthcoming 
without legal or official pressure.'' So says 
Edward Carpenter. 

Something of this sort has now in emergency 
been organized at Liverpool by the admirable 
efforts of Lord Derby, and unloaders of ships 
have been made to feel the real usefulness of 
their labour by being put into khaki. 

"For years attention has been called to the 
peculiarly unsatisfactory and demoralizing posi- 
tion of the casual dock labourer. Now at one 
blow he is to be given the status, the pay, and 
the security of a public servant. The form of 
organization is obviously exceptional and tem- 
porary, devised to meet exceptional and temporary 
circumstances, but if the experiment is successful 
it will have proved that organization is possible, 
and that the great problem of casual labour, the 
most fertile perhaps of all sources of poverty 
and social degradation, is quite capable of solu- 
tion." 

How far from a happy condition of things 
we have been, in normal times, the writings of 
socialists and the songs of our poets make 
manifest. The mean streets and sordid sur- 
roundings amid which masses dwell — in spring 
time and harvest and all the year round, in this 
age of large cities and mercantile prosperity — 
these evil conditions, so alien to the merry 
England and smiling countryside of our less 
prosperous days, are having their due effect, and 
leave visible traces on both the body and the 



INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS 177 

soul of the modern craftsman. William Morris's 
lyric which records the "Message of the March 
Wind" is not the less exquisite a poem because 
it is a trenchant, even a practical "criticism of 
life": 

Hark ! the March wind again of a people is telling 
Of the life that they live there, so haggard and grim, 

That if we and our love amidst them had been dwelling 
My fondness had faltered, thy beauty grown dim. 

This land we have loved in our love and our leisure 
For them hangs in heaven, high out of their reach ; 

The wide hills o'er the sea-plain for them have no pleasure, 
The grey homes of their fathers no story to teach. 

The singers have sung and the builders have builded, 
The painters have fashioned their tales of delight ; 

For what and for whom hath the world's book been gilded, 
When all is for these but the blackness of night ? 

How long, and for what is their patience abiding ? 

How oft and how oft shall their story be told? 
While the hope that none seeketh in darkness is hiding, 

And in grief and in sorrow the world groweth old? 



CHAPTER XXII 

SOCIAL REFORM 
GOD SAVE THE PEOPLE 

THE following extract shows the way in 
which enlightened manufacturers regard 
their relations to their workpeople:— 
"We must not forget that, fortunately, the 
wage-earners in this country are steadily be- 
coming better educated, and acquiring a more 
intelligent appreciation of the industrial system 
and of their place in it. They think with truth 
that in the past they have not had a fair share 
either in wealth or leisure of the immense gain 
that has been made through the progress of 
science and invention. But this is not the only 
cause of the industrial unrest. They want — 
and surely this is a very legitimate demand! — ■ 
more control over their own lives. The problem 
of the future, which the capitalist classes have 
to meet, is in the first place a wider and more 
equitable distribution of wealth and leisure; and 
in the second, to devise some method by which 
the workers can have some share in the control 
of the industry in which they are engaged'' (Ed- 
ward Cadbury on "Scientific Management in 
Industry"). 

The first step towards reform — dissatisfaction 

178 



SOCIAL REFORM 179 

with present conditions — has probably been 
already taken; the second step, which will be 
taken as soon as wage-earners get better edu- 
cated, is to begin to look forward and make 
provision for the future and acquire a stake in 
the country and an outlook much wider than 
any they possess at present. Since they con- 
stitute the majority of the human race, this 
is surely a good thing and one worthy of en- 
couragement from every humane point of view. 

Consider therefore the causes which on the 
whole at present tend to keep masses of 
humanity down at a lower level than they need 
occupy. 

One, and I believe rather a potent one, is 
their hand-to-mouth thriftless style of living: a 
possible cause, and at the same time a certain 
consequence, of the floating labour market and 
the system of the weekly wage. 

Thrift 

The precariousness and insecurity of tenure 
associated with the weekly-wage system, and 
the habit, so difficult to eradicate, of spending 
each week's earnings before the next is received, 
are destructive of foresight, thrift, and responsi- 
bility, in all except the strongest characters. The 
system is bound to induce happy-go-lucky irres- 
ponsible light-heartedness, which, though in itself 
not without merit in times of health and pros- 
perity, affords very little foot-hold and is no 
sort of stand-by in times of sickness, unemploy- 
ment, or distress. That such a system can retain 
its hold on workers, when they have had 



180 THE WAR AND AFTER 

experience of the fluctuation of trade and the 
uncertainties of employment, is very remark- 
able; and until it can be changed so that the 
working classes exercise some sort of forethought 
and prudential care — such as is characteristic 
of the classes immediately above them — so long 
they will be liable to periods of acute distress, and 
will be more or less at the mercy of the exceptional 
self-seeking Capitalist. 

It is true that they possess the weapon of the 
Strike, but it is a weapon very injurious to the 
Nation and very sharp-edged in the handle to 
those who use it; in fact it is a weapon without 
a handle, and cannot be clutched without pain 
and injury. Moreover readiness for warfare 
is no substitute for provident arrangements 
whereby they could set aside sufficient to tide 
them over difficult periods. 

Since the ultimate object of all industry can 
only be a richer and fuller human life — though 
that is too infrequently remembered, — and since 
self-respect or personal dignity is a contributory 
asset to such a life, it follows that whatever the 
State can do to encourage thrift should be 
done. 

There would be no harm in receiving pay- 
ment week by week, if it were not necessarily 
spent week by week, and if an amount were 
always stored so as to secure the necessary 
independence. The practical difficulty of saving 
small sums is however not insignificant. To 
put money into any Benefit or Building Society 
which becomes insolvent, is not only ruinous 
to a few individuals, but is discouraging to any 
nascent spirit of saving in the Nation. Failures 



SOCIAL REFORM 181 

of that kind, which at one time were too fre- 
quent, must be held responsible for a great 
deal of evil. And though supervision and 
better management have put such Societies on 
a much sounder basis, the benefits they confer, 
and the freedom of their members, are limited. 
They do not fully, though they do partially, 
supply the need of an easily managed banking 
account. Cash in the pocket involves tempta- 
tions greatly in excess of cash at the Bank; 
but what bank is there that will take workmen's 
savings? There used to be the Provincial 
Savings Bank, with Government security and 
three per cent interest; every complete thirty- 
three shillings deposited earning an interest 
of a penny a month. In my youth I was one of 
the Trustees of such a Savings Bank at Hanley. 
It was open only for a few hours twice a week, 
Saturday afternoon and Monday evening; and 
the Trustees used to attend in rotation, along 
with a paid official, either to receive the sums 
brought by small depositors on Saturday or to 
pay them out as well as receive on Monday. 
I remember the inconvenience and delay to 
which those who came (mostly women) were 
subjected. They received tickets from a porter 
as they entered, giving them their place on 
a bench, where they sat after the manner of a 
queue until their turn came for admission into 
the counting-house, whence, after transacting 
their business, they went away through another 
door. It was slow and tedious work, and the 
patience with which they put up with it im- 
pressed me, especially when (as sometimes hap- 
pened) either the paid official or the trustee 



182 THE WAR AND AFTER 

happened to be late. But what impressed me 
also was the small maximum of deposit 
allowed; for more than once I heard a man 
told that he must take the money out, or that 
no more could be received, as it had reached 
the maximum. They used sometimes to ask in 
despair where they were to put it, but on that 
question it was a responsible matter to offer sound 
advice. 

Nowadays the Post Office Savings Bank 
system no doubt diminishes a great many of 
the mere inconveniences; but still the total that 
can thus be saved is strictly limited to £200; 
with a maximum of fifty pounds deposit in 
any one year. I suppose that the restriction 
is insisted on in order to avoid competition with 
ordinary banks; but surely those have plenty 
to do in connection with large affairs. The 
retention of small savings with absolute security 
is so vital to the interests of the Country that I 
cannot but feel that the maximum ought to 
be abolished, and every other encouragement 
given to easy saving by the people — not for 
sickness only, as by a scheme of insurance; 
still less by any compulsory method; but as 
a part of the education of the Country towards 
foresight and towards civic and family responsi- 
bility. 1 It seems to me that a change of habit 
of that kind would do more to diminish the 
drink evil, and other kinds of extravagance, 

1 The recent opening of an unlimited Fund with perfect 
security, to small investors, is therefore an event of the ut- 
most significance ; and if the War Loan be continued, in 
principle, into peace time, it will have a vast influence on the 
true prosperity of the country. 



SOCIAL REFORM 183 

than any more direct and prohibitive measure. 
It is always indirect methods that are the most 
efficacious; not mere mechanical negative pro- 
hibition, but real positive strengthening of 
character and improvement of the outlook on 
life. 

And while thus incidentally touching on the 
drink question, — surely indirect methods are the 
best mode of dealing with that. Temperance 
by forcible suppression is worth very little com- 
pared with temperance in the interests of frugality 
and self-respect. Once cultivate a sense 
of human dignity, — and drunkenness becomes 
impossible. 

But if this is too long a process — though with 
national education it need not be so long under 
a rational social system, — then there are other 
indirect methods which may be employed. As 
to their merits I am incompetent to judge; but 
I quote here the advice of Mr. Robert Blatch- 
ford, who on such a matter must be well worth 
listening to: — 

"The remedy for all these evils is State control 
of the drink traffic. All distilleries and breweries 
should be Government concerns. All 'places 
within the meaning of the Act' should be State 
owned. The drink quick and drink often, ugly, 
vulgar, or blatant 'inns/ 'hotels/ 'pubs/ and 
gin-palaces, should be abolished, and good hotels 
and cafes should be opened in their place. If 
that were done there would be no need for 
prohibition/' 

We may well agree with Milton when he 
says : — 

' 'And were I the chooser, a dram of well- 



184 THE WAR AND AFTER 

doing should be preferred before many times 
as much forcible hindrance of evil doing. For 
God sure esteems the growth and completing 
of one virtuous person more than the restraint 
of ten vicious.' " 

Oh if only we had wisdom enough to take 
hold of social evils at their roots, and not be 
merely trying to lop off their excrescences and 
prune them into some sort of conformity! It 
is not militarism alone that we are now engaged 
in fighting. 

"We really are fighting all together for a 
new and better state of existence. And we 
may surely hope — even those who have but 
small confidence — that some of its results appear 
already. In nearly all countries engaged in 
the war we see a process of regeneration going 
on. . . . Russia has renounced drink, is ac- 
quiring initiative, conquering that national 
apathy which, more than anything else, barred 
her on the road towards progress and freedom. 
France is pulling herself together, reintegrating, 
regaining self-control. Germany is completing 
her fusion into unity, breaking up from within 
those demarcations of caste and calling which 
have handicapped so much her free evolution, 
and learning in the school of sacrifice to distin- 
guish between true and false ideals." So says 
Count Hermann Keyserling, in the Hibbert 
Journal, and we may at all events hope that he 
is right. 

And what is England doing? It must be 
preparing to do something in the way of na- 
tional reform. As yet it has not begun. 
We are a long way from the idea that daily 



SOCIAL REFORM 185 

work may be a joy; like that felt by William 
Morris, — 

To-morrow's uprising to deeds shall be sweet. 

We are not yet up to the standard of past 
centuries in recognizing and upholding the 
pleasure and dignity of labour. 

"Think what this meant to the worker: think 
what it meant to him when his work exercised 
and developed, not his manual skill only, but his 
best faculties — intellectual, imaginative, inventive. 
I have heard people wonder why England in 
those days was called Merrie England? It was 
because the labour of the nation — which after all 
is the nation's chief concern and most absorbing 
occupation — was itself a source of pleasure and 
of pride." 1 

There was a time — the time of the Guilds 
of industry — when the worker took joy in his 
work, when he had initiative, and could con- 
struct things of beauty. This was the era of 
the Gothic cathedrals. Work was done then 
that was worth living for. 

It has become a very serious question, whether 
England possesses a soul now as it did in the 
past. Industrialism has sadly interfered with 
Art, and the modern method of putting out a 
contract to the lowest tender is not likely to 
result in the building of cathedrals or any other 
object of beauty. 

The lack of joy in work is deprecated even 
by those who rejoice in the Forth Bridge kind 

1 Mr. Lisle March-Phillips, in a paper read before the 
Peasant Art Fellowship. 



186 THE WAR AND AFTER 

of structure that we do make and make well; 
so it is in no way surprising that persons of 
taste and culture should lament the deca- 
dence of works of art, and the fall in the 
status and conditions of labour, since, let us 
say, the twelfth century, when individual resource 
and prowess had more scope, and when handi- 
craft had a soul. 

A writer in the Hibbert Journal for April 
1915 says — 

"Wiser generations, yet unborn, will surely 
look back with wonder upon the ugly experi- 
ment of mechanical industrialism. From the 
very first it was patent that the freedom it 
promised hung chains about the many; and 
yet it was quickly accepted and riveted upon 
the world's comparatively free life, with almost 
universal approval. To dub it 'progress' was 
sufficient to secure a submission fatal as that 
we criticize in the Germans to-day: the sub- 
mission of the romantic, peasant-filled, kindly 
Germany of the ancient towns and the fairy- 
haunted Christmas-tree forests, to the prosaic 
power and plans of Prussia!" 

Germany has gone farther in this decadence 
than we have, has gone farther and fared worse. 
It is not content with being, like ourselves, com- 
paratively unable to produce, — it rejoices in having 
the power actively to destroy. 

But unless these works are renewed, time will 
destroy them, only more slowly. And that we 
are powerless to prevent; for under present con- 
ditions we cannot renew them, we can only 
deceptively restore. 

"It is probably true that we should not 



SOCIAL REFORM 187 

bring up big guns against Gothic cathedrals; 
but we are not wholly clean of such crimes, 
for all that. As complacent units in modern 
industrial civilization we are all bearing a hand 
in the black miracle — the exact antithesis to 
the Christian making and mending miracle — 
the black miracle of undoing. Krupp guns 
may destroy the glory of Rheims Cathedral in 
a few days: the destructive method for 
which we are partly responsible is slower but 
surer. Our modern civilization, built up on 
mechanical industrialism (or, it were truer to 
say, imprisoned withira it, ensnared at every 
turn in its barbed wire entanglements), has 
been, throughout its whole devastating era, 
whittling away or corrupting those very powers 
in the race which made a Rheims Cathedral 
possible. 

"There can be no doubt — its very nature 
and origin prove it — that Gothic art was a source 
of joy to the population of the country and a 
potent influence beautifying and ennobling the 
life of the whole nation." 

In those days it appears that the organizing 
Architect was himself a craftsman: — 

"All members of all handicrafts, of whatever 
kind, were united in brotherhoods, and these 
brotherhoods were the depositaries of all know- 
ledge in regard to that craft, and the only 
authorities on the right methods of work. 
There was no outside dictation. Labour, 
skilled and disciplined and organized, found 
out the best way of doing things, and did 
them. . . . 

"There is something extraordinarily imposing 



188 THE WAR AND AFTER 

in these mediaeval brotherhoods of workmen, in 
the wisdom and sagacity of their laws, in their 
firmness and moderation, in the proud independ- 
ence of their attitude." 

Let us hope that something of this kind 
will emerge from the ashes of this shocking 
contest, and that a brotherhood feeling may 
once again rise among all the workers and 
contributors to noble works of Art. It may 
now, with greater facilities of intercourse, easily 
become an international feeling, and may 
include the workers even of the enemy; for 
among us — save when exasperated by inhuman 
atrocities — fellow-feeling for them has never 
really ceased. 

The party calling itself the Independent Labour 
Party has made serious mistakes in policy, its 
heart is stronger than its head, and its atti- 
tude in some respects has been deplorable; but 
it is eagerly anxious for the right, and although 
friendly feeling across the breach is hardly 
reciprocated at the present time, it is some- 
thing to feel that on our side at least it is 
as vivid as ever. Apart from any mere party 
significance which may be foisted into it, a re- 
cent manifesto of this party may on this ground 
be welcomed;— 

"We hail our working-class comrades of 
every land. Across the roar of guns we send 
greeting to the German Socialists. They have 
laboured unceasingly to promote good relations 
with Britain, as we with Germany. They are 
no enemies of ours, but faithful friends. In 
forcing this appalling crime upon the nations, it 
is the rulers, the diplomats, the militarists, who 



SOCIAL REFORM 189 

have sealed their doom. In tears and blood and 
bitterness the greater Democracy will be born. 
With steadfast faith we greet the future; our 
cause is holy and imperishable, and the labour 
of our hands has not been in vain." 

But who shall so forecast the years 
And find in loss a gain to match? 
Or reach a hand thro' time to catch 

The far-off interest of tears? 



CHAPTER XXIII 

EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 

SOME years ago it seemed to be thought 
that any one who considered the welfare 
of other nations as well as his own was no 
true patriot. Fortunately the present state of 
things must put an end to that selfish and 
shortsighted provincialism. Even a nation is 
not an end in itself; and the wide area of 
the present calamity, and the number of nations 
which have been drawn into it, are a sign of 
the progress that has been already made 
towards union. Honourable behaviour of a na- 
tional kind has also received a stimulus, if only 
from the utter disgust which conspicuous and 
flagrant dishonour has aroused. 

The intercourse between man and man, even 
in the competitive scheme known as business, 
is governed on the whole by considerations of 
personal honour; though it is admittedly a little 
hard sometimes, especially for an inexperienced 
novice in commerce, to know what will be con- 
sidered honourable or otherwise. But though 
there may be a difficulty in drawing the line, and 
though it is in some places rather perilously elastic, 
there is no doubt at all that a man who distinctly 
oversteps it and over-reaches his neighbour by 
sharp practice is stigmatized as dishonourable; 

190 



EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 191 

and it is further recognized that, on the whole, 
honourable behaviour pays better than the 
reverse. 

Complexity of scheming, or shall we say 
duplicity, is not appreciated; it is universally 
condemned as double dealing. A certain kind 
of strong simplicity is favourably regarded and 
exerts a beneficent influence. Single-mindedness 
— simplicity — the opposite of duplicity- — is on the 
whole what we aim at. 

But unfortunately the intercourse between 
nations is sometimes otherwise conducted. The 
kind of Diplomacy illustrated on page 69 and 
confessed by our foes is mere Duplicity. Secret 
treaties, spying information, underhand practices, 
and over-reaching methods, are among the methods 
of diplomatic intercourse. So long as this goes 
on international business is conducted under 
serious difficulties; and if only single-mindedness 
and simplicity could be introduced and accepted 
as the traditional method — to depart from which 
would be dishonourable — how vast would be the 
improvement! The change is bound to come in 
time — we cannot go on always as at present, — 
and Sir Edward Grey's fine example affords hope 
for the future. 

We are all parts of humanity, and if one 
member suffer, all others suffer with it. Fair 
dealing is becoming the essence of prosperity in 
business. Fair dealing between nation and na- 
tion will conduce to the prosperity as well as to 
the peace of the world. 

To see a nation disregard its obligations, tear 
up its treaties, and spread abroad stupid and 
malicious lies, is no joy to the rest of the world 



192 THE WAR AND AFTER 

— not even to its enemies. It is a grief and a 
humiliation, an insult to humanity. There would 
be a kind of stern joy in meeting an honourable 
foe — one with whom at the conclusion of strife 
we could shake hands heartily across the battle- 
fields and welcome back with brotherly love. 

But now, alas! where is the honour of our 
foe? Even in his own eyes the word must have 
become despicable. 

"The word 'honour' when applied to a 
nation is sometimes used in a sense almost 
opposite to the 'honour' of an individual. An 
honourable man is one who declines to take 
any advantage of his neighbour, either by 
violence, legality, or deceit, and seeks to set 
right any financial advantage he may have 
improperly or accidentally gained. A secret 
treaty with one neighbour against the interests 
of another would not be made by an honour- 
able man; while the repudiation of his cove- 
nant or cynical breaking of his given word is 
unthinkable. But between nation and nation 
we had all, more or less, been labouring under 
the delusion that there is a genuine divergence 
of interests, and that prosperity of one nation 
depends on the ruin of others: whereas if 
any permanent settlement is to be reached we 
must escape from this delusion and learn to 
see more clearly a common goal for the human 
race." 

"The man who feels no regret for the ruined 
honour of other nations, must be poor in 
sympathy for the honour of his own country." 

Seen with far-sighted vision our country's 
real interests are not the selfish considerations 



EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 193 

which ordinarily go by that name, any more 
than they are so for an individual: there are 
times when it is our duty to lend a helping 
hand, even at some risk to ourselves. For 
instance — as Mrs. Browning says, — "non-inter- 
vention in the affairs of neighbouring States 
is a high political virtue; but non-inter- 
ference does not mean passing by on the other 
side when your neighbour falls among thieves. 
. . . If patriotism be a virtue indeed, it 
cannot mean an exclusive devotion to our 
country's interests, for that is only another form 
of devotion to personal interests, family interests, 
or provincial interests, all of which, if not driven 
past themselves, are vulgar and immoral ob- 
jects." 

The more the nations co-operate, the stronger 
the feeling of nationality. That is indeed an 
instrument without which our conjoint effort 
would be much weakened. Let us always stand 
up for the integrity of the smaller nations. 

The more the nations co-operate, the stronger 
and happier will humanity become. Together 
we have to strive for the mastery over Nature, 
for the overcoming of disease, for the better 
education of the race, for the triumph of mind 
over matter and of soul over body. In this 
we must give each other all the help and en- 
couragement we can. The task is hard enough 
without fratricidal strife. 

"Nationality is sacred to me," said Mazzini, 
"because I see in it the instrument of labour 
for the good and progress of all men." Mazzini 
based his love of country on the faith that the 
claims of humanity come first, and that a 



194 THE WAR AND AFTER 

country is false to itself if it does not keep in 
view the good of all mankind. If it finds its 
strength in the weakness of another, if it is 
indifferent to the cause of struggling nations, it 
has no right to exist as a nation. "National 
life and international life should be the two mani- 
festations of the same principle, the love of 
good." 

The apostrophe of Fichte, quoted at the end 
of Chapter I, is the peroration of his famous 
Address to the German Nation which he issued 
in 1807 after the humiliation inflicted on 
Germany by Napoleon at the beginning of last 
century. It was a summons to the spirit of 
Nationality. 

Nation and Country, he claims, extend far 
beyond the State. For ordinary times the spirit 
of civic well-being is sufficient, but for dis- 
turbed and unprecedented occasions the only spirit 
that can be put at the helm is one generated 
by the consuming flame of the higher Patriotism, 
which conceives the nation as the embodiment 
of the eternal. 

Among the steps that can be taken to create 
that spirit he looks to Education as the means 
that had hitherto been overlooked. He knows 
that the Press will try to ridicule a spiritual 
weapon of that kind, but he says: 

"Perhaps I deceive myself, but I cannot part 
with it, as it is all I care to live for,— I hope 
to convince some Germans and bring them to 
see that nothing but Education can rescue us 
from the miseries that overwhelm us." 

This was understood by the German people, 



EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 195 

and on the obelisk erected in his honour at Berlin 
they have placed this inscription : — 

"The Teachers shall shine as the brightness 
of the firmament, and they that turn many 
to righteousness as the stars for ever and 
ever." 

So his nation listened, and did attend to 
Education: attended to it more thoroughly than 
any other nation; and it is to this cause that 
they owe their real progress and access of 
power. They have spoiled it, but that was due 
to the defects of their other qualities. They 
were unable to divest themselves of pedantry, 
they were earnest and accomplished in many 
good directions, but their learning took a pon- 
derous and unattractive form, and they inflicted 
a mechanical system upon their youth. Upon 
the fly-leaf of one of their text-books the 
English writer "Bagshot" is said to have 
relieved his mind by writing the following 
diatribe : — 

"My heart," he writes, "goes out to the un- 
happy German youth who have fallen under the 
yoke of this horrible pedant. It enrages me 
to think of him and a hundred like him let loose 
on a country to turn its schools and universities 
into gigantic tool-factories for the making of 
human implements. To-morrow I will start for 
Germany and tell this man to his face that 
education has no purpose but to make men 
philosophers. He will not understand my mean- 
ing, and he will laugh in my face, but happily 
there are some people in Germany who do under- 
stand, and by and by they will rise up and slay 
these pedants and save their country." 



196 THE WAR AND AFTER 

Well, they did not rise in time to save their 
country, though perhaps they will rise now to 
assist its recuperation. But the worst of their 
failure to avoid swamping genuine education 
with Kultur, is that it will tend to discredit 
education itself — in their own minds and in the 
minds of other nations. 

Yet the war ought to show us how intense 
is the need for better and higher education 
among the governing classes of this country. 
I do not specify which" the governing classes 
really are — that may be differently regarded — 
but their vast ignorance of everything relating 
to science is admitted on all hands — admitted 
without shame and even with a sort of bastard 
pride by most of those who may be called our* 
governing oligarchy. Surely we shall not let 
science continue to grub along like a sort of 
Cinderella, called in occasionally when housework 
has to be done, but otherwise left to sit among 
the ashes and brood. 

Men of science are usually content to go on 
with their studies and be attended to only when 
they expound some fresh discovery, or when 
some of their inventions come into practical use. 
But there come periods when the nation's 
neglect of science, and mistrust of its workers, 
lead perilously near to disaster. At those times 
they have to speak; and some scientific men 
are speaking now, and calling attention to the 
momentous contrast in this respect between the 
enemy nation and our own. Never was the 
parable of the Unjust Steward so illuminated as 
it is to-day, never was the need to learn from 
the wisdom of this world more forcibly urged 



EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 197 

by the march of events. Science alone is 
powerless to save humanity, but science neglected 
and kept in the background may help to ruin 
it. Among much evil, the organized pursuit of 
science and development of its application has 
been one good; and to it the strength of the 
German nation, for better for worse, is largely 
due. I fear that Britain has not learnt that full 
strength yet. Defect of soul may render it ulti- 
mately impotent, but in itself the weapon is one 
of power, and no vice need be inherent in its 
use. 

We are not yet awake to the material weak- 
ness of our position, and perhaps it would be 
a calamity if the present catastrophe were over 
before this lesson had been driven into our 
brains. 

A pittance doled out by Government depart- 
ments, and administered with rigid economy, 
is no way to encourage research. Some lavish- 
ness is necessary, and much trust. The un- 
scrupluous scientific man can make money now: 
it is not difficult, if you are ready to abandon 
the high ambition of youth and take your part 
in the world-scramble on its own terms. But 
what folly it is to throw away the enthusiasm 
of youth as if it were of no value, and limit the 
possibility of scientific achievement to the few 
hours that can be spared from the effort to 
earn a precarious livelihood by teaching and 
examining. 

The only way to bring the weakness of the 
present position home to people in general is 
to emphasize the side of the applications of 
science to industry and manufacture. Every- 



198 THE WAR AND AFTER 

thing really depends on research for its own 
sake; but the highest genius cannot be organized, 
it can only be maintained — fundamental dis- 
coveries are not made to order. But, even for 
pure research, material means must be forth- 
coming; and it is only when a Royal Institution 
provides the laboratories, or when family accident 
renders an individual what is called "independent" 
— absurd word, — that a Faraday or a Cavendish 
becomes possible. Never will more than the few 
realize the importance of pure science; but its 
application to industry ought to appeal to all, 
one would have thought, in this commercial com- 
munity. But no, the power of indirection has not 
yet been fully grasped, and still only the direct 
and obvious means are employed by most of 
those who are strenuously trying to increase 
their business. 

English official neglect of science has been 
a byword among those who are behind the scenes 
and who realize what might be done 
— what in fact has been done in other 
countries. 

The difference between German thoroughness 
and our supineness is felt in many sciences, 
but it is felt most strongly in the science which 
owes most to Germany — namqly chemistry. 
Chemists have inveighed against the dis- 
couragement offered to them here, compared 
with opportunities provided for chemical re- 
search in Germany, and have pointed to the 
practical and commercial results and conse- 
quences which flow from this difference — conse- 
quences which are now being bitterly driven 
home. A recent Address to the Society of 



EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 199 

Chemical Industry was devoted by its President, 
Professor Frankland, to this very theme, and I 
shall quote a few extracts so as to illustrate at 
first hand the strong feeling which throughout 
the last half -century has existed among 
chemists : — 

"The mischief caused through the neglect of 
chemistry by practical men in this country has 
been so subtle that to a large extent it has 
remained concealed from the average man of 
intelligence and from the governmental classes. 
. . . The systematic neglect of chemical science 
and the failure by manufacturers to utilize 
the services of highly qualified chemists, could 
only lead to the result that all the industries 
which are dependent on a profound knowledge 
of chemistry must tend to disappear from our 
midst, and pass into the hands of those who 
are prepared, not only to apply new chemical 
discoveries to industry, but even to prosecute 
the most varied chemical investigations in the 
hope of sooner or later making discoveries 
which shall be of advantage to their commercial 
undertakings. 

"It is in the possession of such schools of 
research, both in the universities and in the 
chemical factories, that Germany has by two 
generations the lead of all other countries in the 
world. . . . The facts which I have brought 
forward speak for themselves and proclaim in 
the most convincing manner the stupendous pro- 
gress which has been made by Germany in the 
chemical industries during the past forty years. 
. . . If the chemical industries are to be re- 
habilitated in this country, there must be a 



200 THE WAR AND AFTER 

complete change in the attitude of mind towards 
science in general, and towards chemical science 
in particular, amongst the influential classes of 
the population; and it will certainly not be 
effected by following the precept 'business as 
usual/ but by pursuing a policy which is the 
exact opposite of what is implied by that vulgar 
and undignified phrase. . . . The study of 
chemistry in this country now only draws those 
men who either have or think they have an 
overpowering zeal and passion for the science, to 
which they devote themselves against the advice 
of their friends, and in spite of the warnings 
of the professors of chemistry by whom they 
are initiated/' 

And to show that this represents no indi- 
vidual opinion, but is representative of those 
who have special knowledge on the subject, here 
is part of the text of a Memorial presented by 
the Chemical Society to the Government on The 
Position of Chemical Industries. 

"Though, during the past thirty years, there 
have been some signs of progress in the appli- 
cation of science to the chemical manufactures 
of the country, there can be no doubt that in 
this respect we are still far behind several 
foreign countries, especially Germany, where 
it has been fully recognized for more than 
half a century that 'scientific research work, 
carried out in the laboratory, is the soul of in- 
dustrial prosperity/ 

"As representatives of chemical science we 
are of opinion that the main causes of the back- 
ward condition of chemical industry in this 
country have been: — 



EDUCATION AND SCIENCE 201 

i. The defects of our educational 
system and particularly the lack of recog- 
nition of the importance of research as 
an essential part of the training of the 
student of science. 

2. The want of scientific knowledge 
on the part of the community at large, 
especially of manufacturers, and the non- 
appreciation of the true value of scientific 
research. 

3. The lack of organization amongst 
various chemical and allied industries. 

4. The almost total want of sympathy 
and co-operation between manufacturers 
and workers in pure science." 

Nevertheless, as Professor Frankland says: — 
"Notwithstanding the absence of material 
inducements, I venture to say without fear of 
contradiction that there is more original investi- 
gation being prosecuted in this country by 
chemists than by any other body of British 
men of science; and this I attribute to the 
fact that such a large proportion of our number 
have either been at German Universities or 
are the pupils of those who have been at these 
centres of research. Nor are any of us, I 
am sure, even during this unfortunate crisis, 
unmindful of the hospitality and the inspiration 
which we have received in the schools of the 
enemy." 

That is quite true; in pure science we have 
no enemy. Discoveries once made are open 
to all; and all are co-operators and friends. 
A wholesome spirit of emulation may exist, but 



202 THE WAR AND AFTER 

that is very different from ruthless competition. 
The feeling of co-workers in every depart- 
ment of knowledge is one of camaraderie and 
friendship, just as it appears to be beginning 
to be among artisans. The present miserable 
mania has interrupted this feeling for a time, 
but it will be renewed hereafter; and though 
indirect in its effect, there is no feeling more 
immediately tending towards goodwill and 
peace. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

P£AC£ AND DISARMAMENT 

DISARMAMENT is not a policy: it will 
be a consequence, an effect, following upon 
a changed spirit in humanity. 
"The true doctrine of peace is not the 
Tolstoy an gospel of non-resistance; it is, 
indeed, its very negation. It is no part of 
the doctrine of the pacifist that he shall place 
himself at the mercy of the militarist, and that 
in his very endeavour to secure peace he shall 
disarm himself whilst the militarist is preparing 
to attack him. The Utopian says: 'Disarma- 
ment first, conversion afterwards/ Common- 
sense and sound reason reply: 'Such a policy 
would be suicidal. Faith must precede works. 
Let the world be first converted, and disarma- 
ment must needs follow.' . . . Towards that 
political education and conversion the schools 
will do — must do — a great deal in the future. 
They are doing very little in the present. At 
present the intellectual training of the schoolboy 
is hopelessly antiquated, and is almost entirely 
based on the study of the military civilizations 
of the past. The mind of the schoolboy imbibes 
from his earliest years the poison of militarism 
and of the old Imperialism. In ordinary times 
he only learns about the glamour and the 

203 



204 THE WAR AND AFTER 

romance of the wars of olden days; he learns 
nothing about the horrors and realities of war 
to-day." So said Dr. Sarolea in 1912. 

He also said that the Universities were doing 
at present little more than the schools; and 
that the Churches were doing least of all. 

If we wish for peace we must prepare for 
peace; we must seek peace and ensue it — 
not in a passive non-resisting manner but in a 
very active and energetic and strenuous 
way. 

"And here is a lesson for those eager pacifists 
who try to make us love peace by talking of 
the folly and horrors of war. We shall only 
love peace when we have made it worthy of 
our love. Until then there will still be a narrow 
truth in the saying, Si vis pacem, para helium. 
But that must give way to the greater truth 
that if you would have peace you must make 
it finer than war. And there is something 
to be learned from war, from its discipline 
and sacrifice and concord, of what peace ought 
to be/' 

Hear Milton on this subject: — 

"If after being released from the toils of 
war, you neglect the arts of peace, if your 
peace and your liberty be a state of warfare, 
if war be your only virtue, the summit of your 
praise, you will soon find peace most adverse 
to your interests. Your peace will only be a 
more distressing war, and that which you 
imagined liberty wall prove the worst of 
slavery." 

That excellent little book called THougHts on 
the War, by Mr. Clutton-Brock, contains many 



PEACE AND DISARMAMENT 205 

excellent passages, one or two of which I should 
like here to quote: — 

"War does us this good at least — that it 
makes us suddenly aware of the difference 
between a gentleman at his club and a gentle- 
man in the trenches. Beautiful things happen 
between officers and men when the British Army- 
is at war, and it brings the tears to our eyes 
to hear of them. But it is not enough to feel 
these fine emotions and because of them to 
say that war is not all an evil. That is so only 
if war teaches us how to make a finer peace, 
and one that will cure us of all desire for war, — 
a peace in which gentlemen will prove them- 
selves, as these officers proved themselves; and 
if they do not, they will lose the name of 
gentlemen. In war there is a chance of great 
adventures for all men, rich and poor, and the 
poorest can be a hero. But we must make a 
peace too in which the poorest will have a 
chance of adventures of the mind and spirit, 
and in which all men will know that these are 
worth more than riches or the respect now given 
to riches. . . . Peace should not be full of 
aimlessness and stagnation, but of purpose and 
advance. It should mean an order like that 
of armies in the field, made by the tie between 
leaders and led, the tie of a common duty 
and a common opportunity. Then war would 
be merely a distraction from that purpose and 
a check to that advance, and men would be as 
impatient of it as if it were a noise breaking 
in upon music. 

"We speak of the adventures of peace, 
adventures of the mind and spirit. Most men 



206 THE WAR AND AFTER 

know so little of these that to them the artist, 
the philosopher, the saint, the man of science, 
are not adventurers at all. They cannot believe 
in the exultation of victory where there is no 
enemy, in the thrill of discovery where there 
are only material obstacles to overcome. To 
them, and we cannot wonder at it, work is 
all part of a struggle for life and of the routine 
imposed upon men by that struggle; and peace 
means that routine unbroken and uninspired. 
They may try to escape from it by gambling, 
by sport, by debauchery, by all the varieties of 
what we are pleased to call pleasure, and finally 
by war. But there is another escape, possible 
now to our civilization, with its new command 
of all the forces of Nature, an escape into the 
freedom of the mind which art and thought 
and religion offer to us. But what have we done 
yet with all our power to make that freedom 
possible to all?'' 

"To be free," says Milton, "is the same thing 
as to be pious, to be wise, to be frugal and 
abstinent, to be temperate and just, and lastly; 
to be magnanimous and brave; and to be the 
opposite of these is to be a slave." 

"How can we have time for war among our- 
selves when there is infinity before us to be felt 
and probed in so short a span of life, when we 
have the power to create another world of art 
with all the hopes and desires of men shaping 
it and sounding through it?" 

But to this end the higher and more real 
education of the people is essential; especially 
since the government of the country is now so 
largely in their hands. 



PEACE AND DISARMAMENT 207 

"The peoples of the world desire peace," 
said Bourtzeff, the Russian exile — and he, who 
has been in many lands, ought to know. But 
they also — if they would obtain peace— must 
exercise an eternal vigilance lest they fall into 
the hands of class-schemers and be betrayed 
into that which they do not desire. The 
example of Germany shows how easily a good 
and friendly and pacific people may by mere 
political inattention and ignorance, and by 
a quasi-scientific philosophy imposed on its polit- 
ical ignorance, be led into a disastrous situation. 
It shows how vitally necessary it is that the 
people, even the working masses and the peasants, 
should have some sort of political education and 
understanding. 

The power of political thinking, like any 
other power, only grows by exercise; and as 
Edward Carpenter says: — 

"Until we rise, as a nation, to a conception 
of what we mean by our national life, finer 
and grander than a mere counting of trade-returns, 
what can we expect save disaster after disaster 
to bring us to our senses? 

"Possibly in the conviction that she is fighting 
for a worthy object (the end of militarism), 
and in the determination (if sincerely carried out) 
of once more playing her part in the world as 
the protector of small nations, Britain may find 
her salvation, and a cause which will save her 
soul." 



CHAPTER XXV 

NATIONAL REARRANGEMENT 

We beseech Thee to give to all nations Unity, Peace, and 
Concord. 

FOR the general public to make up its mind 
concerning details of national rearrange- 
ment after the war is no doubt unpardonable 
and futile; and yet we cannot but hope for 
certain changes, and can hardly refrain from 
privately thinking over them, well knowing that 
our meditations carry no authority, and must be 
modified — perhaps extensively modified- — by cir- 
cumstances. The task of arrangement will be 
a severe one, and many proposals must be dis- 
cussed which cannot in their entirety be carried 
out. What we may all legitimately hope is 
that it will be in no vengeful spirit that this 
country will enter into the negotiations — save 
for the insisting on just punishment for actual 
crime. But that accomplished, the right of 
defeated foes to live — and not only to live but 
to prosper, subject to heavy indemnities for the 
losses they have inflicted on their neighbours by 
their hideously mistaken policy — that right will, 
let us hope, be fully recognized. For a per- 
manent settlement must be based upon public 
right. 

208 



NATIONAL REARRANGEMENT 209 

Here let us quote the eloquent utterance of 
the Prime Minister, as laying down a general 
basis of settlement: — 

"The idea of public right," says Mr. Asquith, 
"what does it mean when translated into con- 
crete terms? It means, first and foremost, the 
clearing of the ground by the definite repudia- 
tion of militarism as the governing factor in 
the relation of States, and in the future mould- 
ing of the European world. It means, next, 
that room must be found and kept for the in- 
dependent existence and the free development of 
the smaller nationalities — each with a corporate 
consciousness of its own. Belgium, Holland, 
and Switzerland, and the Scandinavian coun- 
tries, Greece, and the Balkan States, must be 
recognized as having exactly as good a title as 
their more powerful neighbours — more power- 
ful in strength as in wealth — exactly as good a 
title to a place in the sun. And it means, 
finally, or it ought to mean, perhaps by a 
slow and gradual process, the substitution for 
force, for the clash of competing ambition, for 
grouping and alliances and a precarious equi- 
poise, — the substitution for all these things of a 
real European partnership, based on the recog- 
nition of equal right established and enforced by 
a common will." 

Let us therefore, who agree with this admir- 
able statement, cultivate as far as possible the 
idea of a federation of European nations — the 
recognition of common interests, without com- 
mon jealousies and antagonisms — a federation 
for all purposes, both peace and war. Let us 
have fewer languages and more mutual under- 



210 THE WAR AND AFTER 

standing, freer mutual interchange of commodi- 
ties; and if there is any European war hence- 
forward, let it be recognized as that horrible 
evil, civil war. Moreover, in order to give 
strength and solidity to the federation, let every 
citizen pass through a period of disciplinary 
training for his better education and bodily 
development, and let the immense reserve 
potential army thus constituted be used as an 
international police to see that henceforward no 
one misguided nation, under some ambitious ruler 
or set of rulers, flouts the rest of humanity and 
tries to set itself up as above everything human 
or divine. Let it be a police force able to carry 
out the dictates of international law with a strong 
and resolute hand; but let it jealously guard free- 
dom — the freedom even of revolt — and only come 
into action in suppression of actual crime. And 
if ever, under unwise or vicious counsellors, the 
British Fleet be used as a weapon of aggression 
and domineering insolence — which God forbid — 
then let Britain be made to suffer by the rest 
of the civilized world. 

The reason our command of the seas has been 
regarded with equanimity is because we only use 
our Fleet to keep the seas open and trade routes 
equally free to all nations. Under a policy of 
artificial limitations, invidious Tariffs, and 
restricted commerce, our Fleet might possibly 
become a menace; and its dominance could then 
be properly resented by any nation whose com- 
mercial activities it tended unfairly to restrain. 

Our policy should surely be continually to 
urge the advantage of Free Trade all round. 
Let every country produce that which its 



NATIONAL REARRANGEMENT 211 

economical conditions and natural aptitudes best 
fit it for. Freedom in such matters undoubtedly 
benefits humanity by enabling each country to 
develop its resources to the uttermost, whether 
assisted by foreign enterprise and capital and 
by imported labour, or otherwise. And let 
every nation, small or large, develop its own 
genius and individuality, free from any attempt 
at coercion to one pattern: let it have full 
responsibility for its own errors, and credit for its 
own successes. 

Small Nations 

We have stood up for the small nations; we 
have recognized their rights and their value. 
The British Empire is already a federation of 
friendly nations, and the independence which 
ever since the mistake about America has been 
granted to its Colonies has been more than 
justified. 

We must see to it that a country nearer home 
is emancipated too, and left free to develop its 
own genius without mistrust and without coer- 
cion. Ireland, by its striking loyalty, as well as 
by its always conspicuous bravery, has earned 
its modified independence, and henceforth must 
be one of the friendly nations in the British 
Empire. 

Consider what we owe to the small nations — 
we may almost say that to them is due the 
progress of the world. In some of the best 
epochs in history all nations were small; com- 
munities which produced some of the greatest 
of mankind were no more than cities. Value 



212 THE WAR AND AFTER 

in spiritual things cannot be numerically esti- 
mated; nor has numbering the people always 
been reckoned a judicious act. 

Of high modern examples of small popula- 
tions Lord Bryce gives the following historical 
summary : — 

"In modern Europe what do we not owe to 
little Switzerland, lighting the torch of freedom 
six hundred years ago, and keeping it alight 
through all the centuries when despotic mon- 
archies held the rest of the European Continent? 
And what to free Holland, with her great men of 
learning and her painters surpassing those of 
all other countries save Italy? So the small 
Scandinavian nations have given to the world 
famous men of science, from Linnaeus down- 
wards, poets like Tegner and Bjornson, scholars 
like Madvig, dauntless explorers like Fridtjof 
Nansen. England had, in the age of Shake- 
speare, Bacon, and Milton, a population little 
larger than that of Bulgaria to-day. The 
United States, in the days of Washington and 
Franklin and Jefferson and Hamilton and Mar- 
shall, counted fewer inhabitants than Denmark 
or Greece." 

And the following is by Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, 
Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield:- — 

"Almost everything which is most precious 
in our civilization has come from small States — 
the Old Testament, the Homeric poems, the 
Attic and the Elizabethan drama, the art of the 
Italian Renaissance, the common law of Eng- 
land. Nobody needs to be told what humanity 
owes to Athens, Florence, Geneva, or Weimar. 
The world's debt to any one of these small 



NATIONAL REARRANGEMENT 213 

States far exceeds all that has issued from the 
militant monarchies of Louis XIV, of Napoleon, 
of the present Emperor of Germany. ... In the 
particular points of heroic and martial patriotism, 
civic pride and political prudence, they have often 
reached the highest levels to which it is possible 
for humanity to attain; and from Thucydides, 
Plato, and Aristotle, as well as from the illustrious 
school of Florentine historians and publicists, 
the world has learnt nine-tenths of its best political 
wisdom." 

But indeed, when considering the possible 
outcome from small communities, there is no 
need to go beyond the country now called 
Syria! And it is interesting to remember that 
that sufficiently momentous Advent occurred dur- 
ing a numbering of the people by the Emperor 
of Rome. One more head to be counted 
— or perhaps to be ignored by the enume- 
rators as too insignificant an item in the 
stable of an inn; true majesty being only dis- 
cernible by the extra simple and the extra 
wise! 

But, returning to more prosaic matters, it is 
manifest that one of the minor advantages flow- 
ing from the existence of smaller States consists 
in the fact that they serve as convenient labora- 
tories for social experiment on a moderate 
scale. Much material for the comparative study 
of social and industrial expedients has been 
provided by the enterprise of the American State 
Legislatures. Such experiments as women's suf- 
frage, or as the State control of the public sale 
of alcoholic drink, or as a thoroughgoing appli- 
cation of the Reformatory theory of punishment, 



214 THE WAR AND AFTER 

would hardly be seriously contemplated in large, 
old, and settled communities, were it not for the 
fact that they have been tried upon a smaller 
scale by the more adventurous Legislatures of the 
New World. 

Ths East of Europe; 

If I attempt to touch on the thorny questions 
bristling round the East of Europe, it must be 
in a spirit of irresponsibility; not as an his- 
torian writing for statesmen, but as an ordinary 
citizen discussing contemporary possibilities with 
others. To hold aloof altogether and leave every- 
thing to politicians is the German not the English 
method: it is permissible to take an interest even 
in difficult questions, and to welcome one 
solution rather than another when it is 
offered. 

This war, coupled with the warning experi- 
ence gained in the minor war which preceded 
it, when the Turk was nearly ousted and when 
the victors fell into the trap laid for them by 
Prussian diplomacy, ought to make a vast 
difference to that physically attractive part of 
Europe which has perforce remained backward 
in all arts except the art of fighting. They 
have had terrible things to put up with, and 
the older among us well remember the horrible 
atrocities inflicted upon the Bulgarians by the 
governing Turk. But the Bulgarian atrocities 
have now been outdone, and neither the East 
of Europe nor even Asia can teach us anything 
in that direction. 

Surely all that internecine period will be now 



NATIONAL REARRANGEMENT 215 

written off, and the Balkan nations will learn 
to direct their energies in more peaceful and 
profitable directions, except when they may have 
to combine against a common foe. 

The gallantry shown by Serbia is univer- 
sally recognized; and its future is clearly going 
to be an important one. It is strange to recall 
that the present war immediately arose because 
that country resented a gratuitous attempt, sus- 
tained by Prussia and instigated I believe chiefly 
by Hungary, to destroy it and blot out its in- 
dependence. 

Serbia deserves, and doubtless will acquire, 
large provinces on the seaboard of the Adriatic, 
chiefly consisting of Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

Roumania, as one of the Allies, will presumably 
acquire that part of Hungary which is so clearly 
required to give it a rational boundary, and 
which is kin to it in race and language, namely 
Transylvania. 

Italy — thrice welcome as an ally — will at 
length attain its still unredeemed Provinces; and 
no longer will Trieste be a pistol at the head 
of Venice. 

All that is comparatively easy. The difficulty 
will be to see how the Teutonic nations associated 
with German-speaking Austria can likewise have 
an outlet to the Mediterranean. To give them 
Fiume, which seems the only feasible plan, is 
to cut into the Slavonic fringe, and will entail 
serious difficulty; yet a great continental nation 
ought not to be debarred from the sea, and a 
settlement which does not provide some kind oi 
free trade outlet is likely to cause restlessness 
and future trouble. 



216 THE WAR AND AFTER 

Germany, once liberated from Prussian bully- 
ing control, may arrange for itself to unite its 
ancient kingdoms into a real coequal Federa- 
tion, and to have its headquarters at Vienna or 
Munich or Dresden; and it may be hoped that 
then it will have a fine future before it, when 
the sins of the present generation have been 
wiped out. 

To hamper the natural development of any 
nation or people is folly, even when it is the 
outcome of a w T ell-meaning policy. If we had 
not mistakenly taken part in the boxing in of 
Russia, Constantinople would long ago have 
been in its hands; we should have been freed 
from its inevitable efforts to press out in other 
directions, ever since, its natural exit being closed; 
and we should not now be seriously hampered by 
the problem of the Dardanelles. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

THE FUTURE OF EUROPE 

THE Nation as a whole cannot enter into 
details concerning conditions of peace, but 
it may strengthen the hands of its respon- 
sible ministers and assist future negotiations if 
it makes up its mind to a few essentials. 
Among these are: — 

Settlement of boundaries on national and racial 
lines, in accordance with the wishes of the in- 
habitants if strongly expressed. 

Punishment of highly placed criminals who 
ordered atrocities. Among which the use of 
non-combatants as a screen for a firing line is 
perhaps the most infernal, because it is a newly 
invented outrage on humanity and beneath the 
standard even of savage warfare. 

The universally recognized duty of all civi- 
lized nations to Belgium cannot be better 
expressed than in the words of Wordsworth — 
merely substituting that other word for the 
word "Spain." 

"The first end to be secured by [Belgium] 
is riddance of the enemy; the second, per- 
manent independence. . . . Humanity and honour 
and justice, and all the sacred feelings connected 
with atonement, retribution, and satisfaction; 

217 



218 THE WAR AND AFTER 

shame that will not sleep, and the sting of 
unperformed duty; and all the powers of the 
mind, the memory that broods over the 
dead and turns to the living, the under- 
standing, the imagination, and the reason; — 
demand and enjoin that the wanton oppressor 
should be driven, with confusion and dismay, 
from the country which he has so heinously 
abused.'' 

International crime is a calamity, but it is 
one that should be promptly put down. Prus- 
sianism must cease; the dominion of Prussia 
over Germany and of the Prussian spirit as it 
has spread into Austria, Russia, and other 
countries, must terminate. Too long has the 
world suffered the arrogance of this upstart 
nation. 

But beyond these essential preliminaries, 
there are a number of problems which soon will 
have to be faced, and which may be partly 
enumerated : — 

First as regards the prestige of Prussia and 
its supposed services to the rest of Germany. 
Dr. Sarolea, summing up the situation in 
1912, says that he is convinced that German 
unity would have come sooner without the inter- 
vention of Prussia, that it would have been 
closer, more real, more permanent, and attained 
at far less cost. 

"German unity is far from being an accom- 
plished fact. Germany remains a geographical 
expression. After all, even to the most super- 
ficial observer, it must be apparent to-day that 
iron and blood have not welded Germany 
together. Neither Schleswig-Holstein nor Alsace- 



THE FUTURE OF EUROPE 219 

Lorraine, nor Hanover nor Poland, are integral 
parts of the Empire. Technically the kingdom 
of Prussia to-day includes many provinces, like 
the Rhine Provinces, which have nothing Prus- 
sian in character. . . . Historic Prussia is 
comparatively barren and monotonous, whereas 
Germany has a rich diversity of smiling vine- 
yards and romantic Scenery, is traversed by 
magnificent rivers, is the seat of prosperous 
industries. Germany can boast of a comparatively 
pure Teutonic stock; Prussians proper are a 
mixed race, and their composition is more 
Slavonic than Teutonic." 

Prussia has been a danger and disaster to 
Germany as well as to the rest of the world, 
and German unity has been more formal than 
real until the present tragic tightening of the 
bonds which precedes their snapping. 

The unification of Germany, so far as it has 
gone, was really accomplished by the will of 
the people. The States were ready for it in 
1864: it was only declined then because Prus- 
sian arrogance objected to receive an imperial 
crown at the hands of the people. It was ulti- 
mately achieved by blood and iron, and 
achieved badly, with Prussia in an intolerable 
position; though Germany, being docile, ac- 
quiesced, and has • suffered accordingly, especi- 
ally from having imbibed some of the vices 
of the conquering State. For these it must suffer 
in the future too; but the result should be that 
something more like the old German spirit will 
arise out of the ashes. 

"Modern Germany has made obvious to all 
in what sense the traditional ways of the West 



THE WAR AND AFTER 

are wrong; the pain she has inflicted, the 
suffering she endures, will induce, at last, the 
long-wanted change. . . . None can foretell what 
the Germans will be like even ten years hence; 
an enormous amount of what they are com- 
mitting just now has nothing whatever to do 
with their soul — it is the result of machinery, 
automatism, prejudice. If the machine falls to 
pieces, all may change." 

As for rearrangement in Europe, the peoples 
must largely settle it for themselves. It is not 
our business to arrange their affairs, though we 
may give help where it is needed. We shall 
certainly acquire no jot of Europe — not even 
Heligoland; — it belongs to Holstein, let it share 
the fate of Holstein. And if with Schleswig 
that province wishes to return to Denmark, as 
other provinces will wish to return to France, 
let it be so. If not, Heligoland may have to 
be made an International Station, for security to 
the rest of the world. 

So also in the near East, let the nations 
secure their individuality and combine in such 
way as they think best, on a basis of nationality 
and sympathetic understanding. The time has 
passed for alien rule. If German-speaking 
Austria wishes to unite with the federated Ger- 
man Southern States, it is only appropriate that 
it should; and it would help to emancipate all 
the others from the dominance of Prussia. The 
present haphazard Austrian Empire will break 
up; but the historic German Empire may again 
have its seat in Vienna. 

It may be that thereby also the re-constituted 
Germany will gain an outlet to the Mediter- 



THE FUTURE OF EUROPE 221 

ranean, instead of being limited for ocean- 
going purposes to a small coast-'line on the 
North Sea. Let us hope that it will develop 
its peaceful arts and commerce to the benefit 
of itself and of the world. No restrictions or 
hampering of the peaceful development of Ger- 
man industry and commerce should be enforced. 
But the Prussian Navy — the Navy of the Kiel 
Canal — has been made a bad use of: whatever 
fate is in store for that destructive force, it is 
too dangerous a weapon to leave in the hands 
of those who wish for world dominance. The 
object of its creation was not to keep 
the seas open for international traffic, but 
to destroy all traffic but its own. That cannot 
be tolerated. 

But, except the provinces of Prussian aggran- 
dizement, Germany itself need not lose terri- 
tory. The robberies of Prussia must go back 
to their owners, except in so far as the inhabi- 
tants wish to unite with Germany. Germany 
may thus be united on a better basis, and in a 
more real sense, than before. 

As for the German colonies, it has no need of 
any in the Pacific; they may be considered 
emancipated from its hated rule. For the others 
let time decide. It has still to learn how to 
govern them, hitherto it has failed: though 
Germans can colonize admirably under other 
flags. Politically they are behind the time, and 
for the present will have plenty to do to put 
their house in order and keep themselves to 
themselves. Ultimately there may be a future 
for German Colonies in South America; 
and if that development be attempted, I 



m THE WAR AND AFTER 

trust that we shall imitate the example 
of our friends in the Northern Continent and 
remain strictly neutral and impartial. Unless 
indeed — which God avert — international crime be 
again committed. 

The Kingdom of Poland must be reconstituted 
and re-united, presumably under the suzerainty 
of the Czar; and if possible it should have an 
outlet to the Baltic Sea for trading purposes. 
For if in the past the Polish nation made 
grievous mistakes, "no nation has paid more 
dearly for them, or has retrieved them more 
heroically. No nation has been greater in mis- 
fortune. Surely a nation which has produced 
great men in all branches of human activity, 
which has produced a Copernicus, a Sobieski, 
a Kosciusko, a Mickiewic, and a Chopin, is 
not a nation of mere barbarians. A nation which 
for a hundred and fifty years has asserted itself 
against overwhelming odds has proved its right 
to live/' 

The immense Empire of Russia must no 
longer be land-locked; it must be trusted with 
the key of its own door, and must undoubtedly 
possess Constantinople; thereby its legitimate 
needs will be satisfied, and it need no longer 
press out to the sea in other directions. Of land 
it has ample and to spare; and it would have 
had access to the sea more than half a century 
ago, had it not been for our grievously mis- 
taken policy of those days. 

The result may have turned out well however, 
for Russia of those days had not had its trials: 
it was still in many respects barbarous. In 
the interim, although its government has been 



THE FUTURE OF EUROPE 223 

under Prussian influence to its great detriment 
and discredit, it has made great progress, and 
now that it is freed from that malign influence 
we have hopes of better things. The world 
may owe a great debt to the Russia of the 
future. 

We cannot provide against every con- 
tingency; our policy is to trust the Slavonic 
race now that it is, we hope permanently, 
emancipated from Prussian bedevilment. The 
heart of the Russian people is more sound 
and essentially Christian than perhaps that of 
any other nation. We shall find that it has 
much to teach us, and a genuine place in the 
higher spiritual development of the world. 
When the political sins and shortcomings of 
Russia in the past — especially its brutal sup- 
pression of struggling hopes for freedom — are 
again thrust before our notice, — as they will 
be, — let us remember our own dealings with 
Ireland; and let us recollect further that sucli 
errors, grievous as they are, belong to an early 
stage of development, and signify that the 
country responsible for them is legitimately be- 
hindhand, and has a century or two still to make 
up. 

I have some sympathy with the sentiments 
expressed by Mr. Cloudesley Brereton in an 
article in the Revue de Paris for 15 March 191 5, 
which I translate thus: — 

"Most of our views of Russia come to us 
through that parti-coloured window, Germany, 
— whose particular interest it is to show us 
every colour except white. Personally I prefer 
to base my ideas of that country on the writings 



££4 THE WAR AND AFTER 

of Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, Maxim Gorki, and 
Stephen Graham, in which the greatness of the 
Russian soul shines out continually in all its 
naive simplicity. To me Russia, in spite of all 
her faults, appears an unlimited reservoir of 
brotherly love, compassion, and mercy. The great 
ideas of Russia, if they come into contact with 
our own, should help us to cast out much 
that is hard and narrow in our civilization, and 
thus create a new spirit in the Western peoples. 

"The other day," he goes on to say, "I 
asked Stephen Graham the following question: 
'What will be our relations with the Russians 
at the end of the war? 7 He replied: 'Treat 
them generously and they will surpass you in 
generosity. But deal with them crookedly and 
they will undoubtedly turn upon you!' So 
diplomats, beware!" 

There remains the problem of the Balkan 
States: doubtless too technical for amateur treat- 
ment. A few words therefore only. 

Serbia will gain extensive territory from 
Austria, and, in harmony it is to be hoped with 
Italy, will face the Adriatic and probably ac- 
quire the Slavonic part of Dalmatia. 

Greece, we hope, for its own sake, will join 
the Allies in time, under the guidance of its 
eminent statesman Venizelos; and will thereby 
acquire Smyrna and some fine hinterland in Asia 
Minor, which is deserving of a better fate than 
its present derelict condition. 

Bulgaria, if it makes a wise choice and 
throws its powerful aid into the scale, will 
probably again enlarge its borders up to the 
Chataldja lines- — this time in a permanent 



THE FUTURE OF EUROPE 225 

manner, and will get back a large tract of 
Macedonia. 

The Gates of the Black Sea will be a diffi- 
culty to any State, such as Roumania, for whom 
the Black Sea is the only seaboard. Whether 
the Dardanelles can by International Treaty be 
kept open for all peaceful trading, in the in- 
terests of countries which Border the Black Sea; 
and whether the Kiel Canal can be similarly 
Internationalized and employed for commerce only, 
we must leave to Statesmen to decide. 

We might hope that henceforth Constanti- 
nople and Heligoland, like Gibraltar hitherto, 
may be used as guarantees of opportunity for 
peaceable development and progress. 

The imminent defeat of the Turk will eject 
the Turkish Government from Europe. But 
there is one small part of Asia that should like- 
wise be liberated from his blighting rule. The 
protectorate which has been exercised over Egypt, 
with admirable results, should be extended to 
Syria, and that country be once more offered 
to the Jews. Some people think they do not 
want it, but they have not yet had the refusal 
of it, — that responsibility should be offered 
them; but whether they accept it or not, the 
Turk should go, and some measure of untaxed 
prosperity be restored to a tract of country 
immeasurably sacred to the greater part of man- 
kind. It is natural for humanity to guard and 
care for places round which memory clings. There 
was a time when we might have acquiesced in 
the ousting of the Turk by Germany: that did 
not look at all improbable. Now it is a thing 



226 THE WAR AND AFTER 

that cannot be contemplated; it would be merely- 
replacing one desecration by another. 

The simplest solution is to restore Palestine 
to Egypt, to which till comparatively recently 
it belonged, and thus secure its adequate pro- 
tection while leaving it free to develop its own 
resources in accordance with the genius of what- 
ever inhabitants, Hebrew or other, go to live there. 
For in the future it may once again be pros- 
perous, when the devastating blight of greedy 
Turkish misgovernment is removed. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

OTHER HOME REFORMS 

A PERSONALITY is compounded of moods, 
— serious sometimes and sometimes frivo- 
lous, sometimes gay, sometimes depressed; 
so that an effort is occasionally required to 
realize that a single individuality is concerned 
all the time. Greater simplicity and consistency 
is expected from characters in literature, or they 
would be confusing. Actions, thoughts, and 
even tastes are in most real cases variable, 
and dependent on the prevailing mood; and 
in each mood, if it last long enough, something 
definite can be accomplished. Wisdom lies 
in trying to coerce the less productive moods 
into harmony with those which really corre- 
spond to and are most approved by the higher 
self:— 

Tasks in hours of insight will'd 

Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd. 

And the mind of a nation is, in that sense, 
moody too. It is strange now to look back 
over the frivolities and eccentricities, the ex- 
citements and trivialities, through which we 
have passed — we who have lived through the 
latter half of the nineteenth century: — from 

227 



S28 THE WAR AND AFTER 

that trivial excrescence of the genuine aesthetic 
movement, genially satirized in "Patience," down 
to the inane foolishness of Tango Teas. 

But the mood of the nation is serious now: 
and now is the time for something good to be 
accomplished, and some real progress made. 

What a splendid spirit is now active! The 
self-sacrificing labour thrown into the Red 
Cross and Ambulance movement alone is 
magnificent. From the Queen Mother down- 
wards, every class is seeking, by influence, per- 
sonal support and personal work, to mitigate 
the hideous suffering and preserve some beauty 
and kindness on this planet. 

Our eyes henceforth may be wider open. And 
with a keener perception of the dignity and 
beauty of life — yes even of the physical beauty 
of this island of ours, to which we have grown 
so accustomed that we fail adequately to appre- 
ciate it — we shall not so tamely allow it to be 
defaced and vulgarized in the supposed interests 
of trade. 

It is not a good thing to become careless 
and callous to scenes of beauty, and to acquiesce 
tamely in the disfigurement of home surround- 
ings. Beauty is one of the Divine attributes — 
a fact insufficiently remembered. Providence has 
given us a land which in its first flush of summer 
glory almost oppresses sensitive souls with un- 
speakable feeling; and among the chief cities of 
the world architects have done much to place 
our own capital not indeed on an eminence but 
in a high and worthy place. Let us be careful 
of these trusts. 

Now that we have grown accustomed to more 



OTHER HOME REFORMS 229 

moderate darkness in London, we must not have 
those whisky advertisements flaunted across the 
Thames, nor the traffic made dangerous and 
the streets ugly and vulgar by revolving sky- 
signs; while as for the country — the country 
which men have died to defend — shall it not 
at last be cleared of advertisement boards of 
pills and trash? 

This may seem a small matter, but it is typical 
of much. Why should the country be smeared 
over with the printed cries of street hawkers? 
Are we never to be able to clear our minds of 
sordid trifles unless we are rich enough to own 
large estates or to travel abroad? The country 
does not belong to the hucksters — let them be 
satisfied with the towns. And there, let them 
be kept within reasonable bounds and subject 
to rational control. 

Landlords used to govern the country, as 
many laws testify: they have now largely given 
place to tradesmen; but in all cases it is the 
lowest type who take advantage of the oppor- 
tunities offered, and who make themselves and 
their wares obnoxious. That is the worst of 
permitting abuses. A set whom their fellows 
despise rise into notoriety by the easy process 
of pressing their immunity to the utmost and 
becoming a public nuisance. In any company 
it is the noisy vulgarian who becomes con- 
spicuous; and when conspicuousness is the 
thing desired, noise and vulgarity are the easiest 
steps to its attainment. If the shouting method 
were stopped all round — as it has been with 
almost inconvenient completeness in medicine 
and most of the professions — how much fairer 



230 THE WAR AND AFTER 

it would be to the earnest and silent and digni- 
fied worker! 

Party Politics 

One thing that I hope the war will, if not 
terminate, at any rate greatly mitigate the 
folly of, is the domination in this country 
of the idea and game of party politics. 
Politics has turned out to be too serious a 
matter to be treated as an opportunity for a 
career and personal advancement. Government 
should be carried on by the best brains of the 
nation; and differences of opinion should be 
helpful rather than hampering. The present 
coalition of parties — the aim at a truly com- 
prehensive National Government in face of a 
foe — represents what should be the attitude all 
the time. For there are plenty of foes to be 
contended against beside hostile militarism; 
and to be continually working in the teeth of 
acrimonious opposition, sustained for the sake 
of opposition and in the hope of turning 
the Government out, is unduly wearing and 
demoralizing: it cannot lead to the best 
results. 

It was noticeable not long ago how spokes- 
men of the late Government, Lord Crewe for in- 
stance, in accepting the aid of the Opposition, 
was careful apologetically to say that he quite 
understood that the assistance was not given 
for their sake but for the Country's. Well of 
course it should always be given for the 
Country. But nevertheless some consideration 
is due to those who have the heavy burden 
of directing the policy of the Country; and 



OTHER HOME REFORMS 231 

if some help were afforded for their sake too, 
it would be only reasonable. Such an idea is 
alien to the Party system, and those who are 
receiving help at the present time are anxious 
to disclaim any idea that they are misappro- 
priating it in that way. Yet the animosity be- 
tween the parties, though always proclaimed and 
maintained and having its injurious effect, must 
be somewhat artificial, just as the animosity of 
the foes in the trenches is. And, since war began, 
the politicians have been publicly fraternizing, on 
a sort of inverted Christmas Day, in a way which, 
as private individuals, they either do or would 
like to do ordinarily. 

It is extraordinary that the only way effec- 
tively to disapprove of a Government measure 
- — and nowadays all measures have to be 
Government measures — is to attack the pro- 
posal as a vicious one, to call the Government 
the worst of modern times, and to turn it out 
with invective and contumely. All this strong 
language is part of the game; it is called 
"an appeal to the constituencies. ,, It is under- 
stood to be exaggerated, and what educated 
people consider idiotic, for the benefit of the 
ignorant constituents. This behaviour is really 
contempt of Court, and should be resented by 
voters instead of being enjoyed. Shouts of 
"Give it them," "Let them have it," repre- 
sent to the world that the attitude of the British 
to politics is like their enjoyment of a football 
scrimmage. Political discussion is treated as a 
variety of sport. I hope that we have all learnt 
that it is more serious than that. 

And, after all, what kind of people is it 



THE WAR AND AFTER 

that hustings speeches influence? Only the 
wobblers. The steady voters go on as usual, 
time after time. The election is determined 
"by the small swaying body whose votes can be 
readily caught, — in the old days by bribery, 
in these days by fustian; — and so we have 
"the swing of the pendulum," and the policy 
of the "Outs" versus the "Ins"; the Country 
never getting the benefit of more than 
half its brains, save among its permanent 
officials, who thereby acquire an undue amount 
or irresponsible and unintended and unrecog- 
nized though certainly in some cases beneficent 
power. 

It is sometimes thought that democratic 
government is necessarily of a party kind; but 
that is surely not true of a healthy democracy. 
Party politics appears to be a disease to which 
democracy is liable. Essentially, democracy 
is government by free discussion; but free dis- 
cussion is not synonymous with party discussion. 
On the contrary, party discussion is far from 
free; and every party speaker, like a one-sided 
Counsel in a law case, must feel hampered by 
knowing that his slightest admission will be 
seized and exaggerated unfairly. The party 
system in politics is not unconnected with the 
Advocate system in law. This is not to abuse 
it — it may be to some extent to justify, or at 
least to explain it. Forensic appeals are con- 
stantly being made to a jury: and the judicial 
summing-up is left to historians of the 
future. 

Differences of opinion there are, and ought 
to be, but these should be brought forward and 



OTHER HOME REFORMS 23S 

opposed to each other fairly and squarely, in 
the hope that something better than either of 
the opposing opinions will emerge out of the 
discussion. Discussion, not conflict, — discussion 
with full persuasion that every one is trying to 
do the best he can, and has no other motive — 
represents the right method of managing a great 
business. 

Undiscovered Genius 

A more economical utilization of the best 
brains of the nation should be another aim. 
Utilization not in politics alone, but in science 
and in industry. 

Have we not all been struck with the ability 
shown by assistants and foremen and skilled 
craftsmen such as carpenters? This ability 
should be given fuller scope for its develop- 
ment. In a laboratory it usually is, more or 
less; and the result, in one instance at least, 
was Faraday. 

But in the workshop what chance has a man 
of special ability, to emerge? A little, it is 
true. James Watt was an artisan who ulti- 
mately got his chance; but what pertinacious 
labour and severe trials did he not go through, 
and what opposition he had to overcome! His 
environment opposed and nearly frustrated even 
his great genius: a man of less strength of 
body and tenacity of purpose would have suc- 
cumbed. His example shows that a man of 
genius, combined with strong character, can even 
now win his way to the front; but the country 
is unwise to insist upon such a combination, 
before it gets the benefit of the brains at its 



234 THE WAR AND AFTER 

disposal. As far as possible, things sfiould be 
so organized that ability, even if not specially 
conspicuous, should have its chance. Many 
more laboratories in proportion to the number 
of workshops, would give such a chance: 
laboratories free and unhampered by State 
regulations and control. If State subsidy means 
management by officials, its benefit is almost 
sterilized. 

But worse than that is the jealousy and 
restrictions imposed by workmen themselves. 
Their ideal of marching all together, each 
controlled and limited to a bare average, has 
been a scheme of self-defence adopted by a com- 
munity afflicted by past history and in danger 
of serfdom; but it is not the way to develop 
individuality and give every genius his chance. 
It is, like the customary ideal of a public school, 
planned to suppress originality and maintain 
an average standard. In this way the humdrum 
work of the world can be done, but no great 
production such as future ages will admire is 
likely: distinguished achievement is indeed only 
possible because providential arrangements 
sometimes overrule well-meaning human stu- 
pidity. 

The beehive system is splendid at a certain 
stage of development — something like it may 
be needed in war-time — but it is beneath the 
possible standard of humanity: we can aim 
higher than that. That nation which learns how 
to discover and utilize its great men, in every 
walk of life, will forge ahead to a surprising 
extent, and will advance the general cause of 
civilization. We cannot create or control 



OTHER HOME REFORMS 235 

genius, it bloweth where it listeth, but we can 
control environment: that is our human privilege 
and duty.' 

The debilitating struggle for bare subsist- 
ence should certainly cease. It cannot possibly 
be necessary. Enough for a living is so easily 
procured. Not so easily if agriculture is 
neglected: we ought to keep consciously 
before us the fact that everything has to come 
from the land. That is what receives the sun- 
shine; and it is upon the energy of sunshine 
that the whole activity of our planet necessarily 
depends. The amount of the energy can be 
reckoned, and it is enough to feed far more 
people than ever lived at one time, or are ever 
likely to live. We have hardly yet learned how 
best to utilize it. 

But, if we had, it is not bread alone that man 
needs; he should have leisure to cultivate his 
soul; and education should assist him. Bare 
subsistence is bound to come first, but that 
should be easy: the really difficult things fol- 
low after that. 

Machinery may contribute to subsistence; 
machinery, from the plough upwards, is neces- 
sary for that; but wealth of soul is not in- 
creased by machinery. In so far as machines 
can perform bare mechanical tasks, and thereby 
confer more leisure upon human beings, their 
use is of manifest advantage. Steamships; 
instead of galleys of oars propelled by wretched 
slaves, represent an obvious stride in civiliza- 
tion; while to propel an aeroplane by human 
muscle is simply impossible. 

Greater leisure ought to result from the per- 



236 THE WAR AND AFTER 

formance of mechanical tasks and menial offices 
by machinery. But does it? Increase of out- 
put is often secured instead. "Speeding up" 
is a term invented in America; and humanity 
can thus become more enslaved and desperately 
driven than before. This is, or ought to be, 
the real meaning of the limitation of output 
insisted on by Trade Unions. And when it 
is doubtful whether things are wanted or not, 
such limitation may be legitimate: in peace 
time it may be possible to have over-production. 
But when the things are vitally necessary, when 
they are needed to save the life-blood of your 
fellows, all such artificial limitation of the power 
of machinery becomes criminal. The whole 
nation must be aware that munitions and sup- 
plies of every kind are really needed now; and 
class legislation, like mere party obstruc- 
tion and artificially hostile criticism, must be 
suspended. 

The less of such obstruction and criticism 
that need be renewed after a return to normal 
times, the better for the nation. The entire 
atmosphere of production needs purifying by 
a more wholesome breath. At present manu- 
facturing processes are smothered in the dust 
of recent strife, bound and hampered by 
restrictions founded on mistrust, and choked by 
the noxious gases of greed and selfishness. 
There is now a chance for better relations 
between capital and labour — as an outcome of 
joint sacrifice for a common end; and there is 
some hope that ideas of universal service for the 
good of the Community, and especially a keener 
realization of the fact that human life and 



OTHER HOME REFORMS 237 

welfare are the real objects of all exertion, may 
permeate and reform and re-invigorate the 
land. 

Infant Mortality 

The monotony of environment and absence of 
leisure, and consequent succumbing to tempta- 
tion, may swamp some genius which otherwise 
would enrich the nation; but the unnecessary 
slaughter which goes on hourly among infants 
must destroy the chance of much more. We have 
learned that young life is itself an asset to the 
Community, even apart from exceptional pos- 
sibilities and promise. Given favourable condi- 
tions for development and education, every other 
child born into the world seems likely to promise 
notable service; — else how comes it that the sons 
of peers so frequently blossom into Diplomatists 
and Civil Servants and able Governors and 
holders of important positions under the 
Crown ? 

Clearly the present state of infant mortality 
is a disgrace to the Community; fortunately 
it is felt to be so, and remedies are bein^ 
sought. The present state of stress may 
hasten reform. Motherhood should be better 
protected than at present, and education in 
the management of children should be wide- 
spread. Indeed instruction in elementary 
physiology, generally, would conduce to greater 
respect for the body and diminish the ills due 
to its maltreatment. Compulsory school attend- 
ance too soon after illness is another danger to 
infants. 



THE WAH AND AFTER 
Position of Womkn 

One more of the welcome changes which must 
follow the war is that women will surely 
not have to revert to their old unrecognized 
political position. We have had quite enough 
of a nation which systematically underrates and 
suppresses its own womenfolk, making them 
take a merely subservient position, and treating 
all other women with disrespect and barbarity. 
The exclusion of women from due recognition, 
and the mean estimation in which they have 
been held, is responsible for much evil. It is 
perhaps a curious outcome of war that women 
should come more to the front, but so it is, — in 
every department their help and influence are 
more and more gratefully recognized, — indeed 
the one bright spot in the hideous blunder of 
the Crimea was the emergence of Florence 
Nightingale. 

Women have once more shown that they can 
take their share in war preparation, and in 
national labour and suffering and achievement, 
and in service near the front; while they were 
already engaged usefully in civic and municipal 
enterprises. War does not spare women 
vicariously — it does not even spare them per- 
sonally, as we may have thought and hoped 
that it did — and they are entitled to a voice 
in the affairs which lead to or which avoid war. 
Some of them, in a too recent past, have been 
terribly irritating, but the wisdom of the best 
must be trusted to hold in check or at 
least to counterbalance the impudence and folly 
of the worst. Besides, they have made some 



OTHER HOME REFORMS 239 

amends by wise and patriotic counsel and 
activity in face of real danger. Clamour and 
violence, in past frivolous times, have done their 
cause much harm; but in spite of the 
antics of a minority the wise instincts of 
womanhood can no longer be ignored or 
treated as a negligible asset in the government 
of a State. Daughter nations of the Empire, 
and independent States of America, have tried 
experiments from which we can well learn; and 
surely the present time will not be allowed 
to pass, until artificial and unnatural dis- 
abilities are removed, and opportunity be 
given to all properly qualified citizens to 
take a recognized and official part in work 
which already they share and often largely 
influence. 

It has for some time been noteworthy how 
far more eagerly women put themselves under 
educational influences than do men. Of the 
few who enter professions, or become Scholars, 
it would be impertinent to speak; I speak only 
of the average. They form the majority of an 
audience at any lecture, or at a not immediately, 
professional or too technical opportunity for 
receiving education. Their minds are developing 
and their spirit rising to an unprecedented extent. 
To them always has humanity looked for train- 
ing in its youth: to them it will be looking also 
for training in its age. The faults of emanci- 
pation and the exuberance of political youth may 
be upon them just now, but they are striving 
for light, they are pressing towards the dawn, 
and their loud and sometimes discordant utter- 



240 THE WAR AND AFTER 

ances are but the birth-pangs of a sane and 
noble future. 

"For, when the people speaks loudly, it is 
from being strongly possessed either by the 
Godhead or the Demon; and he who cannot 
discover the true spirit from the false, hath no 
ear for profitable communion/' 



Imagine for a moment that, when peace returns to 
England, we could retain undiminished that sense of 
unity and that self-devotion which have been evoked 
by war, and could use them wisely in all their strength, 
if only for ten years, to make England, morally and so- 
cially, all that it might be. Why, it might become, for 
itself, almost what Shakespeare called it, a "second 
Eden," and, for others, a light to lighten the nations. 

— A. C. Bradley. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

CONCLUSION 

WE live in great and invigorating times, 
when long-do rma;nt energies are set 
free, and revolutionary changes can be 
made, — times which may be a turning-point in 
the history of the world. If so the cost may 
be justified: though the full cost, direct and 
indirect, has not yet been, probably cannot be, 
estimated. Toil and sacrifice, grief and pain, 
are always necessary and inevitable preparations 
for a period of special development and spiritual 
outpouring. The Christian revelation itself was 
not accomplished with Calvary. Gethsemane pre- 
ceded Pentecost. 

Seers and sensitives have known intuitively 
that great events were being forshadowed, they 
felt the coming of the present time, and have 
heralded the advent of a new era. The conflict 
is not solely material, the whole psychic atmo- 
sphere is troubled, and the powers of good are 
arrayed against the forces of evil. To suppose 
that human powers and forces exhaust the cate- 
gory, is to take a limited and purblind— a strictly 
sensory — view of the universe. Mankind is co- 
operating with higher influences — either con- 
sciously or unconsciously — co-operating on both 

241 



9A% THE WAR AND AFTER 

sides; and from the point of view of the evolution 
and progress of humanity on this planet there has 
been real risk of a check and a reverse. Free- 
dom might have been destroyed, a highly organ- 
ized material Kultur might have assumed sway, 
and the advance of humanity in a spiritual 
direction would have been set back for centuries. 
The conflict has been more serious, and the un- 
toward result more possible, than has J^een 
widely perceived. Those who believe in a Divine 
government of the world may have felt assured 
that all would be well, that right must triumph 
in the end; and so it may, but the victory was 
far from certain: there were times when the 
balance terribly oscillated. Divine government 
differs intensely from simple conceptions of it: 
it does not act as the natural man expects. It 
is not overbearing and dominating, but persuasive 
and auxiliary. It does not keep things right by 
main force, nor set them right artificially. It 
calls continually for human co-operation 
and effort, and it never overpowers or chokes 
free will. 

That deadly gift — symbolized in the early 
chapters of Genesis as the knowledge of good 
and evil and the power of conscious choice 
between them — is no pictorial semblance or 
imaginary equipment: it is real, and salutary, 
and alarming. At any moment the human race 
might have decided to go wrong, or by weak- 
ness of resistance and abstention from taking 
pains might allow the power of the devil to 
get the upper hand. There was a real risk, a 
genuine anxiety. Help was available, but only 
in response to heartfelt longing, only accessible 



CONCLUSION 243 

to the demand of a good will. It becomes active 
only in response to what we call prayer. Mental 
and spiritual supineness would have left us de- 
pendent on material preparation alone, and we 
should have been overwhelmed by our enemies. 

The affairs of this planet are surely being 
more and more handed over to conscious 
humanity. More and more are we becoming the 
guiding and directing principle in this sublunary 
sphere. We may do all we can, exert ourselves 
to the utmost, and then, if we realize our lack 
of sufficient power and need of extra help, we 
may ask for it. It will not be forced upon us. 
Our own good will is essential. If we are ready 
to place it in harmony with the Divine will- 
not in a spirit of passivity and acquiescence 
alone, but of work and effort and real sym- 
pathetic exertion, — if we are ready to enter on 
that service which never enslaves but leaves 
us in perfect freedom, — then indeed assistance 
is forthcoming and we cannot be finally 
overcome. 

Freedom is the watchword of humanity, this 
it is which was conferred upon us by Divine 
Charter which may not be revoked. With all 
the pains and penalties attached, we have it; 
and if we — poor struggling insects — determine 
madly to inflict death and torture on each other, 
we may. Not God nor all His angels will stop 
us, — no, not though we inflict scourging and ut- 
most horrors on the incarnate Son. 

People ask despairingly sometimes why man- 
made evils are permitted, why, if Divine inter- 
position is a reality, they are not stopped 
by supernatural force. They do not understand 



244 THE WAR AND AFTER 

the conditions. Free-will, for better for worse, 
has been granted to the human race; and a 
Divine Treaty cannot be torn up. The privilege 
has been granted to us to be not slaves but 
sons; the long education of history to this end 
is behind us, the still longer education of the 
future is before us; and not only for indi- 
viduals but for the whole human race on this 
planet, if it chooses, there remains a magni- 
ficent era. The will of God shall yet be done 
on earth, some day, when it has become the 
human will likewise. In no other way can it 
be done; and this present distress is moving us 
all nearer to the time — long looked forward to, 
and alas! still distant, but approaching — when 
the eyes of all mankind shall be open to spiritual 
truths, when all shall serve Him from the least 
to the greatest, and when the earth shall be 
full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters 
cover the sea. 



INDEX TO QUOTATIONS 



PAGE 

7 "The fact that the sense of 

community" 
7 "the essential principle" „ 



7 "The binding cord" . 

8 "Let us together" 

8 "We may reasonably hail" 

9 "All ages, all the wise" 

12 "All men, at least here in 

England" 
21 "The idea, peculiar to the 

nineteenth century" 

24 "No cultured European 

nation" 

25 "Consequently we find 

Machiavelli" 
29 "notre force" 

29 "Divine must be" 

33 "The sword, as the sword" 

33 "by the soul Only" 

34 "Prussian victories are 

secured" 
43 "Everything which is des- 
perately immoral" 
61 "a kind of instinct", 

65 "In academic circles" 



77 "Happy are all free 

nations" 

78 "Our wills are ours" 



Kant. E. Caird's Critical 

Philosophy of Kant, ii. 350 
Prof. J. H. Muirhead, German 

Philosophy in Relation to the 

War 
Hegel, Phil. of Right, 

p. 245 n. 
Hegel, quoted by E. Caird, 

P- 78 
Kant, Religion within the Limits 

of Reason, Pt. III. 
Fichte, 14th Address, fin. 
Von Hiigel, The Quest, April 

1915 
Bergson, Hibbert Journal, April 

1915 
Prof. Cramb, Germany and 

England 
E. de Selincourt, English Poets 

and the National Ideal 
Verhaeren, La Multiple 

Splendeur 
Wordsworth, Sonnet xxvi. 
Wordsworth, Letter to Capt. 

Pasley, 181 1 
Wordsworth, Sonnet xi. 
Nietzsche, Thoughts out of 

Season 
Wordsworth, pamphlet on The 

Convention of Cintra, 1809 
Emerson, English Traits. Speech 

at Manchester 
Prof. W. J. Ashley's pamphlet 

The War and its Economic 

Aspects 
Mrs. Browning, The Court 

Lady 
Tennyson, In Memoriam (Intro- 
ductory Section) 



245 



246 

PAGE 



THE WAR AND AFTER 



80 Influence of calm weather 



89 "We look around upon the 
larger life" 

97 "Statesmanship would be 
easy" 

103 "These war-lovers are 

creatures" 

104 "The State is no academy" 

107 "As long as guilty actions 
thrive" 

no "Everywhere Germans 

were welcomed" 

115 "Some of their own mili- 
tarist fanatics" 

131 "Shall I not visit" . 

137 "We have seen our 
enemies" 

140 "Blow out, you bugles" 

140 "To you, young men" 

141 "When history records" 
141 "much remains to conquer 

still" 
147 "Unto each man his handi- 
work" 



165 "Commerce is an occupa- 
tion" 

169 "When a man chooses for 
himself" and "Liberty 
has its price" 

176 "For years attention has 
been called" 

178 "God save the people" 

185 "Tomorrow's uprising" 



189 "But who shall so forecast 

the years" 
192 "The word 'honour' when 

applied" 



'Plotinus, Enn. v. 2-3, quoted by 
Myers in Human Personality, 
vol. ii. p. 291 

Wordsworth, Immortality 

Tennyson, In Mem., xcv. 

Sir Henry Jones, The Im- 
manence of God and the 
Individuality of Man 

"The Comments of Bagshot," 
Westminster Gazette, 1908 
(probably by Mr. Spender) 

H. G. Wells, The Peace of the 
World, p. 19 

Treitschke, Lectures on Poli- 
tics 

Wordsworth, The Convention of 
Cintra 

Science Progress, April 1915 

A. Clutton-Brock, Thoughts on 

the War 
Jer. v. 29 
The Arbitrator, May 1915 

Rupert Brooke, Fugitive Pieces. 

See also p. 92 
Lowes Dickinson, pamphlet, 

After the War, p. 18 
E. de Selincourt 
Milton, To Cromwell 

Swinburne, Songs before Sun- 
rise, "Super Flumina Babylo- 
nis." The special reference 
is to Mazzini 

Ruskin, Unto This Last 

E. de Selincourt, English Poets 
and the National Ideal 

The New Statesman, April 10, 

1915 
Ebenezer Elliott, People s 

Anthem 
William Morris, Poems by the 

Way, "The Message of the 

March Wind" 
Tennyson, In Memoriam, I. 

Looking towards Peace, issued 
by Society of Friends 



INDEX TO QUOTATIONS 



24*7 



PAGE 

192 "The man who feels no 

regret" 
204 "And here is a lesson" 
204 "If after being released" . 

206 "How can we have time 
for war?" 

217 "The first end to be se- 
cured" 

219 "Modern Germany has 
made obvious" 

222 "no nation has paid more 
dearly" 

227 "Tasks in hours of insight" 

240 "For, when the people 
speaks" 



Wordsworth, The Convention of 

Cintra 
Dr. Sarolea 
Milton, Second Defence of the 

People of England 
A. Clutton-Brock, Thoughts on 

the War, p. 85 
Wordsworth, The Convention of 

Cintra 
Count Hermann Keyserling, 

Hibbert Journal, April 191 5 
Dr. Sarolea, The Anglo-German 

Problem (1912) 
Matthew Arnold, Morality 
Wordsworth, The Convention of 

Cintra 



INDEX 



Abbe Noel, 30 

Advent, 213 

Advertisements, 229 

Agents, 130 

American help, 106, 121-123, 155 

Armenia, 32, 79, 96, 124 

Arnold, Matthew, 92, 227 

Artists, 18 

Ashley, Professor W. J., 65 

Asquith, Rt. Hon. H., 209 

Atheism, 22, 59, 94 

Austria, vii, 33, 79, 220 

Baal, 52. See Devil worship 
"Bagshot," 42, 97, 195 
Barbarism, 116. See Savagery 
Bargaining, 137 
Beck, Hon. J. M., vi 
Beethoven, 51 
Begbie, Harold, 87, 133 
Belgian neutrality, 112 
Belgium, 29, 30, 50, 52, 76, 102, 

114, 217 
Bennett, Arnold, 103 
Bereavement, 86 
Bergson, 20 
Bernhardi, 68, 69 
Birth of Christ, 213 
Blatchford, Robert, 183 
Bourtzeff, 207 
Boycotting, 121, 155, 156 
Boy Scout, 145, 152, 175 
Bradley, A. C, 44, 240 
Brereton, Cloudesley, 223 
British Empire, 54, 75 
British Fleet, 210 
Brooke, Rupert, 95, 138 
Brotherhood, 124, 187 
Browning, 155 
Browning, E. B., 77, 193 
Brutality, 113. See Savagery 



249 



Bryce, Viscount, 211 
Bulgaria, 32, 96, 124, 214, 224 
Bureaucracy, 72, 81 

Cadbury, Edward, 178 
Calm weather, 80 
Carlyle, 42 

Carpenter, Edward, 176, 207 
Cathedrals, 185, 186 
Cavendish, 198 
Chamberlain, Austen, 49 
Chambers, T. G., 58 
Christendom, 25, 45, 125, 146 
Christianity, 136, 241 
Civilian organization, 151-7 
Civilization, 88 
Clutton-Brock, 63, 64, 205 
Coleridge, 171 
Colonization, 55, 71-73 
Commerce, neutral, 101 
Constantinople, 216, 224 
Co-operation, 67, 203, 242 
Cotton, 101 
Cowardice, 113 
Cramb, Prof., 23, 26, 77, 78 
Creative thought, 18 
Cromwell, 31 
Cycles of recurrence, 16, 17, 89 

Dardanelles, 216 
Darwinism, 56-59 
Democracy, 159, 234 
Denmark, 33, 80 
Denunciations, 128 
Derby, Lord, 176 
Despotism, 79 
Determinism, 20 
Devil-worship, 30, 52, 94 
Dickinson, Lowes, 140, 168 
Diplomacy, 69, 191 
Disarmament, 203 



250 



THE WAR AND AFTER 



Dislike, 78 
Dostoevski, 223 
Drink, 171, 183 
Dulness, 144 149, 172 

Earthquakes, 85, 99 

Education, 63, 160, 194, 200, 239 

Efficiency, 90, 156, 160, 199, 201 

Eliot, Dr. s 106 

Emerson, 61, 70 

Environment, 58, 234 

Ether, 19 

Fallacies, 56-61 
Faraday, go, 198, 233 
Federation, 53 
Fichte, 8, 194 
Fisher, H. A. L., 212 
Fiume, 215 
Football, 117, 125 
Forth Bridge, 185 
Frankland, Prof. P., 199* 201 
Frederick II, 68, 79 
Freedom, 49, 207, 243 
Free Trade, 210 

Galsworthy, 119 
Garibaldi, 100 
Genius, undiscovered, 232 
German Colonies, 221 
German Empire, 216, 220 
German Navy, 221 
German science, 51, 199, 201 
Germany, old, 3, 55 
Gilbert, 79 
Gladstone, 76 
Goethe, 51 

Goldschmidt, Dr. E., 51 
Goodwill, 124 
Graham, Stephen, 223 
Greece, 224 
Green, T. H., 144 
Grey, Sir Edward, 124 

Haeckel, 20, 23 
Hate, 134 
Hegel, 7 
Heine, 23 

Heligoland, 220, 224 
Helmholtz, 51 
Heroism, 144 



Hertz, 51 

Holstein, 33, 218, 220 

Homicidal mania, 87 

Honour, 51, 69, in, 113, 122, 

133, 189, 192 
Hiigel, Baron von, 10, 11, 71, 72 
Hugo, Victor, 86 
Humour, 114 
Hypocrisy, 46, 78, 79, 134 

Ideals, 49 

India, 72 

Indignation, 130 

Infant mortality, 167, 237 

International police, 152, 153 

Invasion, 102 

Italy, 100, no, 216 

J' Accuse, 135, 136 

James, Henry, 75 

Jones, Prof. Sir H., 5 

Jordan, Starr, 168 

Joy in work, 185 

Kaiser, 10, 79, 82, 115 

Kant, 5, 6, 8 

Keane, Dr. A. H., 10 

Keyserling, Count Hermann, 184 

Kiel Canal, 220, 224 

King David, 78 

Kropotkin, Prince, 118 

Kultur, 92 ; 94, 95, 103, 195 

Labour, 165, 171, 173, 176, 178, 

185, 235 
Labour members, 124 
Labour Party, 187 
Labour troubles, 162 
Lankester, Sir E. Ray, 51 
Leisure, 234 
Liberty, 170 
Lincoln, Abraham, 105 
Lister, 123 
London, 228 
Louvain, 23 
Lunacy, 87 
Lusitania, 94, 99 
Lyttelton, Hon. E., 75 

Macedonia, 32, 96 
3Machiavelli a n, 25 
iMachinery, 19, 236 



INDEX 



251 



March- Phillips, Lisle, 185 

Mazzini, 101, 147, 193 

Megalomania, 87 

Mercenaries, 97 

Militarism, 175 

Milton, 31, 109, 117, 142, 183, 204, 

207 
Modern war, 150 
Mohammedanism, 26 
Mommsen, 34 
Mons, 27 

Morris, William, 177, 185 
Motherhood, 237 
Muirhead, Prof. J. H., 4, 5, 14 
Murray, Prof. Gilbert, x 

Naboth's vineyard, 33 
Nansen, 212 
Napoleon, 26, 38, 47 
National anthem, 121 
Nationality, 193 
Neutral commerce, 101 
Nietzsche, 34-42, 115, 144 
Nightingale, Florence, 238 
Non-resistance, 118, 136 

Organization. See Efficiency 
Outcome, 143 

Pacifism, 126-30, 136 

Palestine, 213, 224, 225 

Palmerston, 66 

Party politics, 146, 230-33 

Peace conference, 11 

Picton, Harold, 49 

Pilate, 128 

Planck, Prof, von, 51 

Plotinus, 80 

Plunkett, Sir Horace, 167 

Poison gases, 90 

Poland, 79, 221 

Professors, German, 132 

Prussia, 79, 219 

Ramsay, Sir W., in 
Recruiting, 98 
Red Cross movement, 228 
Relativity, principle of, 51 
Religion, 25, 26, 47, JJ 
Revelation, 129, 241 



Rheims, 186 

Ring and the Book, 154 
Roberts, Lord, 55 
Roosevelt, 105 
Roumania, 214, 224 
Royal Institution, 198 
Ruskin, 146, 157 
Russia, 79, 216, 221 

Sarolea, Dr. C., vi, 68, 70, 71, 81, 

102, 108, 204, 218 
Savagery, 3, 94, 109, 113, 214 
Saving, 182 

Schleswig. See Holstein 
Science, neglect of, 196-201 
Sedgwick, Mrs., 114 
Self-interest, 96, 99 
Selincourt, Prof, de, 2, 25, 141, 

169 
Serbia, 215, 224 
Shakespeare, 84, 108 
Shaw, Bernard, 38, 96, 145, 167 
Sheep-fold parable, 127 
Shepherds and Wise Men, 213 
Shipwrecks, 85 
Sidney, 123 
Simplicity, 191 
Small nations, 209, 211, 212 
Smyrna, 224 
Social experiment, 213 
Socialists, 187 
Speeding up, 236 
Struggle for existence, 56 
Sullivan, 79 
Sully, Prof., 65 
Suppuration, 123 
Swinburne, 147 
Syria, 224 

Tante, 114 

Taube, 80 

Temple cleansing, 120, 124, 127 

Temptation, 94 

Tennyson, 54, 78, 80 

Thackeray, 66 

Thrift, 179 

Titanic, 99 

Tolstoy, 223 

Treitschke, 26, 28, 77, 78 

Tribulation, 137 

Tyrolese, xi, 33, 104 



252 



THE WAR AND AFTER 



Unfair practices, 117 

Union, 53 

Unjust steward, 94, 196 

Venizelos, 224 
Verhaeren, 29 
Volunteers, 98 

Waldenses, 31 
War Loan, 182 
Watt, James, 233 



Webb, Sidney, 167 

Weekly wage, 180 

Wells, H. G., 103 

Wise Men and shepherds, 213 

Wolff, K. R, 38, 39 

Women, position of, 238 

Wordsworth, vi, 29, 43, 81, 107, 
123, 217, 240 

Workers' Educational Associa- 
tion, ix, 62 

Zeppelins, 80 



iggARY OF 



U&?*ESS 







563 




